Word alignments are useful for tasks like statistical and neural machine translation (NMT) and cross-lingual annotation projection. Statistical word aligners perform well, as do methods that extract alignments jointly with translations in NMT. However, most approaches require parallel training data, and quality decreases as less training data is available. We propose word alignment methods that require no parallel data. The key idea is to leverage multilingual word embeddings -both static and contextualized -for word alignment. Our multilingual embeddings are created from monolingual data only without relying on any parallel data or dictionaries. We find that alignments created from embeddings are superior for four and comparable for two language pairs compared to those produced by traditional statistical aligners -even with abundant parallel data; e.g., contextualized embeddings achieve a word alignment F 1 for English-German that is 5 percentage points higher than eflomal, a high-quality statistical aligner, trained on 100k parallel sentences.
With more than 7000 languages worldwide, multilingual natural language processing (NLP) is essential both from an academic and commercial perspective. Researching typological properties of languages is fundamental for progress in multilingual NLP. Examples include assessing language similarity for effective transfer learning, injecting inductive biases into machine learning models or creating resources such as dictionaries and inflection tables. We provide ParCourE, an online tool that allows to browse a word-aligned parallel corpus, covering 1334 languages. We give evidence that this is useful for typological research. ParCourE can be set up for any parallel corpus and can thus be used for typological research on other corpora as well as for exploring their quality and properties.
We introduce CaMEL (Case Marker Extraction without Labels), a novel and challenging task in computational morphology that is especially relevant for low-resource languages. We propose a first model for CaMEL that uses a massively multilingual corpus to extract case markers in 83 languages based only on a noun phrase chunker and an alignment system. To evaluate CaMEL, we automatically construct a silver standard from UniMorph. The case markers extracted by our model can be used to detect and visualise similarities and differences between the case systems of different languages as well as to annotate fine-grained deep cases in languages in which they are not overtly marked.
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