Filtered Inner Product Projection for Crosslingual Embedding Alignment

Vin Sachidananda, Ziyi Yang, Chenguang Zhu

Keywords: multilingual representations, word embeddings, natural language processing

Abstract: Due to widespread interest in machine translation and transfer learning, there are numerous algorithms for mapping multiple embeddings to a shared representation space. Recently, these algorithms have been studied in the setting of bilingual lexicon induction where one seeks to align the embeddings of a source and a target language such that translated word pairs lie close to one another in a common representation space. In this paper, we propose a method, Filtered Inner Product Projection (FIPP), for mapping embeddings to a common representation space. As semantic shifts are pervasive across languages and domains, FIPP first identifies the common geometric structure in both embeddings and then, only on the common structure, aligns the Gram matrices of these embeddings. FIPP is applicable even when the source and target embeddings are of differing dimensionalities. Additionally, FIPP provides computational benefits in ease of implementation and is faster to compute than current approaches. Following the baselines in Glavas et al. 2019, we evaluate FIPP both in the context of bilingual lexicon induction and downstream language tasks. We show that FIPP outperforms existing methods on the XLING BLI dataset for most language pairs while also providing robust performance across downstream tasks.

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