A simple approach to learning unsupervised multilingual embeddings

Abstract

Recent progress on unsupervised cross-lingual embeddings in the bilingual setting has given the impetus to learning a shared embedding space for several languages. A popular framework to solve the latter problem is to solve the following two sub-problems jointly: 1) learning unsupervised word alignment between several language pairs, and 2) learning how to map the monolingual embeddings of every language to shared multilingual space. In contrast, we propose a simple approach by decoupling the above two sub-problems and solving them separately, one after another, using existing techniques. We show that this proposed approach obtains surprisingly good performance in tasks such as bilingual lexicon induction, cross-lingual word similarity, multilingual document classification, and multilingual dependency parsing. When distant languages are involved, the proposed approach shows robust behavior and outperforms existing unsupervised multilingual word embedding approaches.