2017/06/01 by Nikola Mrkšić, Mrkšić, Nikola, Ivan Vulić +13
Computer Science · #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Speech and dialogue systems #Topic Modeling
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1706.00374
openalex publication_date 2017/06/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We present Attract-Repel, an algorithm for improving the semantic quality of word vectors by injecting constraints extracted from lexical resources. Attract-Repel facilitates the use of constraints from mono- and cross-lingual resources, yielding semantically specialised cross-lingual vector spaces. Our evaluation shows that the method can make use of existing cross-lingual lexicons to construct high-quality vector spaces for a plethora of different languages, facilitating semantic transfer from high- to lower-resource ones. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated with state-of-the-art results on semantic similarity datasets in six languages. We next show that Attract-Repel-specialised vectors boost performance in the downstream task of dialogue state tracking (DST) across multiple languages. Finally, we show that cross-lingual vector spaces produced by our algorithm facilitate the training of multilingual DST models, which brings further performance improvements.