Unsupervised cross-lingual model transfer for named entity recognition with contextualized word representations

PLoS One. 2021 Sep 21;16(9):e0257230. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0257230. eCollection 2021.

Abstract

Named entity recognition (NER) is one fundamental task in the natural language processing (NLP) community. Supervised neural network models based on contextualized word representations can achieve highly-competitive performance, which requires a large-scale manually-annotated corpus for training. While for the resource-scarce languages, the construction of such as corpus is always expensive and time-consuming. Thus, unsupervised cross-lingual transfer is one good solution to address the problem. In this work, we investigate the unsupervised cross-lingual NER with model transfer based on contextualized word representations, which greatly advances the cross-lingual NER performance. We study several model transfer settings of the unsupervised cross-lingual NER, including (1) different types of the pretrained transformer-based language models as input, (2) the exploration strategies of the multilingual contextualized word representations, and (3) multi-source adaption. In particular, we propose an adapter-based word representation method combining with parameter generation network (PGN) better to capture the relationship between the source and target languages. We conduct experiments on a benchmark ConLL dataset involving four languages to simulate the cross-lingual setting. Results show that we can obtain highly-competitive performance by cross-lingual model transfer. In particular, our proposed adapter-based PGN model can lead to significant improvements for cross-lingual NER.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Benchmarking
  • Humans
  • Language*
  • Linguistics*
  • Multilingualism*
  • Names
  • Natural Language Processing*
  • Neural Networks, Computer*
  • Recognition, Psychology
  • Semantics

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, grants 62076250 and 61901505. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.