SOTAVerified

Massively Multilingual Sentence Embeddings for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer and Beyond

2018-12-26TACL 2019Code Available1· sign in to hype

Mikel Artetxe, Holger Schwenk

Code Available — Be the first to reproduce this paper.

Reproduce

Code

Abstract

We introduce an architecture to learn joint multilingual sentence representations for 93 languages, belonging to more than 30 different families and written in 28 different scripts. Our system uses a single BiLSTM encoder with a shared BPE vocabulary for all languages, which is coupled with an auxiliary decoder and trained on publicly available parallel corpora. This enables us to learn a classifier on top of the resulting embeddings using English annotated data only, and transfer it to any of the 93 languages without any modification. Our experiments in cross-lingual natural language inference (XNLI dataset), cross-lingual document classification (MLDoc dataset) and parallel corpus mining (BUCC dataset) show the effectiveness of our approach. We also introduce a new test set of aligned sentences in 112 languages, and show that our sentence embeddings obtain strong results in multilingual similarity search even for low-resource languages. Our implementation, the pre-trained encoder and the multilingual test set are available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/LASER

Tasks

Benchmark Results

DatasetModelMetricClaimedVerifiedStatus
BUCC Chinese-to-EnglishMassively Multilingual Sentence EmbeddingsF1 score92.27Unverified
BUCC French-to-EnglishMassively Multilingual Sentence EmbeddingsF1 score93.91Unverified
BUCC German-to-EnglishMassively Multilingual Sentence EmbeddingsF1 score96.19Unverified
BUCC Russian-to-EnglishMassively Multilingual Sentence EmbeddingsF1 score93.3Unverified

Reproductions