@inproceedings{karamanolakis-etal-2020-cross,
title = "Cross-Lingual Text Classification with Minimal Resources by Transferring a Sparse Teacher",
author = "Karamanolakis, Giannis and
Hsu, Daniel and
Gravano, Luis",
editor = "Cohn, Trevor and
He, Yulan and
Liu, Yang",
booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020",
month = nov,
year = "2020",
address = "Online",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2020.findings-emnlp.323/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2020.findings-emnlp.323",
pages = "3604--3622",
abstract = "Cross-lingual text classification alleviates the need for manually labeled documents in a target language by leveraging labeled documents from other languages. Existing approaches for transferring supervision across languages require expensive cross-lingual resources, such as parallel corpora, while less expensive cross-lingual representation learning approaches train classifiers without target labeled documents. In this work, we propose a cross-lingual teacher-student method, CLTS, that generates {\textquotedblleft}weak{\textquotedblright} supervision in the target language using minimal cross-lingual resources, in the form of a small number of word translations. Given a limited translation budget, CLTS extracts and transfers only the most important task-specific seed words across languages and initializes a teacher classifier based on the translated seed words. Then, CLTS iteratively trains a more powerful student that also exploits the context of the seed words in unlabeled target documents and outperforms the teacher. CLTS is simple and surprisingly effective in 18 diverse languages: by transferring just 20 seed words, even a bag-of-words logistic regression student outperforms state-of-the-art cross-lingual methods (e.g., based on multilingual BERT). Moreover, CLTS can accommodate any type of student classifier: leveraging a monolingual BERT student leads to further improvements and outperforms even more expensive approaches by up to 12{\%} in accuracy. Finally, CLTS addresses emerging tasks in low-resource languages using just a small number of word translations."
}
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<modsCollection xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3">
<mods ID="karamanolakis-etal-2020-cross">
<titleInfo>
<title>Cross-Lingual Text Classification with Minimal Resources by Transferring a Sparse Teacher</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Giannis</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Karamanolakis</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Daniel</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Hsu</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Luis</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Gravano</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<dateIssued>2020-11</dateIssued>
</originInfo>
<typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource>
<relatedItem type="host">
<titleInfo>
<title>Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Trevor</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Cohn</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Yulan</namePart>
<namePart type="family">He</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Yang</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Liu</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<publisher>Association for Computational Linguistics</publisher>
<place>
<placeTerm type="text">Online</placeTerm>
</place>
</originInfo>
<genre authority="marcgt">conference publication</genre>
</relatedItem>
<abstract>Cross-lingual text classification alleviates the need for manually labeled documents in a target language by leveraging labeled documents from other languages. Existing approaches for transferring supervision across languages require expensive cross-lingual resources, such as parallel corpora, while less expensive cross-lingual representation learning approaches train classifiers without target labeled documents. In this work, we propose a cross-lingual teacher-student method, CLTS, that generates “weak” supervision in the target language using minimal cross-lingual resources, in the form of a small number of word translations. Given a limited translation budget, CLTS extracts and transfers only the most important task-specific seed words across languages and initializes a teacher classifier based on the translated seed words. Then, CLTS iteratively trains a more powerful student that also exploits the context of the seed words in unlabeled target documents and outperforms the teacher. CLTS is simple and surprisingly effective in 18 diverse languages: by transferring just 20 seed words, even a bag-of-words logistic regression student outperforms state-of-the-art cross-lingual methods (e.g., based on multilingual BERT). Moreover, CLTS can accommodate any type of student classifier: leveraging a monolingual BERT student leads to further improvements and outperforms even more expensive approaches by up to 12% in accuracy. Finally, CLTS addresses emerging tasks in low-resource languages using just a small number of word translations.</abstract>
<identifier type="citekey">karamanolakis-etal-2020-cross</identifier>
<identifier type="doi">10.18653/v1/2020.findings-emnlp.323</identifier>
<location>
<url>https://aclanthology.org/2020.findings-emnlp.323/</url>
</location>
<part>
<date>2020-11</date>
<extent unit="page">
<start>3604</start>
<end>3622</end>
</extent>
</part>
</mods>
</modsCollection>
%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Cross-Lingual Text Classification with Minimal Resources by Transferring a Sparse Teacher
%A Karamanolakis, Giannis
%A Hsu, Daniel
%A Gravano, Luis
%Y Cohn, Trevor
%Y He, Yulan
%Y Liu, Yang
%S Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020
%D 2020
%8 November
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Online
%F karamanolakis-etal-2020-cross
%X Cross-lingual text classification alleviates the need for manually labeled documents in a target language by leveraging labeled documents from other languages. Existing approaches for transferring supervision across languages require expensive cross-lingual resources, such as parallel corpora, while less expensive cross-lingual representation learning approaches train classifiers without target labeled documents. In this work, we propose a cross-lingual teacher-student method, CLTS, that generates “weak” supervision in the target language using minimal cross-lingual resources, in the form of a small number of word translations. Given a limited translation budget, CLTS extracts and transfers only the most important task-specific seed words across languages and initializes a teacher classifier based on the translated seed words. Then, CLTS iteratively trains a more powerful student that also exploits the context of the seed words in unlabeled target documents and outperforms the teacher. CLTS is simple and surprisingly effective in 18 diverse languages: by transferring just 20 seed words, even a bag-of-words logistic regression student outperforms state-of-the-art cross-lingual methods (e.g., based on multilingual BERT). Moreover, CLTS can accommodate any type of student classifier: leveraging a monolingual BERT student leads to further improvements and outperforms even more expensive approaches by up to 12% in accuracy. Finally, CLTS addresses emerging tasks in low-resource languages using just a small number of word translations.
%R 10.18653/v1/2020.findings-emnlp.323
%U https://aclanthology.org/2020.findings-emnlp.323/
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2020.findings-emnlp.323
%P 3604-3622
Markdown (Informal)
[Cross-Lingual Text Classification with Minimal Resources by Transferring a Sparse Teacher](https://aclanthology.org/2020.findings-emnlp.323/) (Karamanolakis et al., Findings 2020)
ACL