2021/04/16 by Elliot Schumacher, Schumacher, Elliot, James Mayfield +3
Computer Science · Decision Sciences · #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #Data Quality and Management #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Topic Modeling
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2104.08082
openalex publication_date 2021/04/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Entity linking -- the task of identifying references in free text to relevant knowledge base representations -- often focuses on single languages. We consider multilingual entity linking, where a single model is trained to link references to same-language knowledge bases in several languages. We propose a neural ranker architecture, which leverages multilingual transformer representations of text to be easily applied to a multilingual setting. We then explore how a neural ranker trained in one language (e.g. English) transfers to an unseen language (e.g. Chinese), and find that while there is a consistent but not large drop in performance. How can this drop in performance be alleviated? We explore adding an adversarial objective to force our model to learn language-invariant representations. We find that using this approach improves recall in several datasets, often matching the in-language performance, thus alleviating some of the performance loss occurring from zero-shot transfer.