Learning to represent bilingual dictionaries

Abstract

Bilingual word embeddings have been widely used to capture the correspondence of lexical semantics in different human languages. However, the cross-lingual correspondence between sentences and words is less studied, despite that this correspondence can significantly benefit many applications such as cross-lingual semantic search and textual inference. To bridge this gap, we propose a neural embedding model that leverages bilingual dictionaries1. The proposed model is trained to map the lexical definitions to the cross-lingual target words, for which we explore with different sentence encoding techniques. To enhance the learning process on limited resources, our model adopts several critical learning strategies, including multi-task learning on different bridges of languages, and joint learning of the dictionary model with a bilingual word embedding model. We conduct experiments on two new tasks. In the cross-lingual reverse dictionary retrieval task, we demonstrate that our model is capable of comprehending bilingual concepts based on descriptions, and the proposed learning strategies are effective. In the bilingual paraphrase identification task, we show that our model effectively associates sentences in different languages via a shared embedding space, and outperforms existing approaches in identifying bilingual paraphrases.