Multi-level cross-lingual attentive neural architecture for low resource name tagging

Abstract

Neural networks have been widely used for English name tagging and have delivered state-of-the-art results. However, for low resource languages, due to the limited resources and lack of training data, taggers tend to have lower performance, in comparison to the English language. In this paper, we tackle this challenging issue by incorporating multi-level cross-lingual knowledge as attention into a neural architecture, which guides low resource name tagging to achieve a better performance. Specifically, we regard entity type distribution as language independent and use bilingual lexicons to bridge cross-lingual semantic mapping. Then, we jointly apply word-level cross-lingual mutual influence and entity-type level monolingual word distributions to enhance low resource name tagging. Experiments on three languages demonstrate the effectiveness of this neural architecture: for Chinese, Uzbek, and Turkish, we are able to yield significant improvements in name tagging over all previous baselines.