Language Adaptation for Entity Relation Classification via Adversarial Neural Networks

Entity relation classification aims to classify the semantic relationship between two marked entities in a given sentence,and plays a vital role in various natural language processing applications.However,existing studies focus on exploiting mono-lingual data in English,due to the lack of labeled data in other languages.How to effectively benefit from a richly-labeled language to help a poorly-labeled language is still an open problem.In this paper,we come up with a language adaptation framework for cross-lingual entity relation classification.The basic idea is to employ adversarial neural networks(AdvNN)to transfer feature representations from one language to another.Especially,such a language adaptation framework enables feature imitation via the competition between a sentence encoder and a rival language discriminator to generate effective representations.To verify the effectiveness of AdvNN,we introduce two kinds of adversarial structures,dual-channel AdvNN and single-channel AdvNN.Experimental results on the ACE 2005 multilingual training corpus show that our single-channel AdvNN achieves the best performance on both unsupervised and semi-supervised scenarios,yielding an improvement of 6.61%and 2.98%over the state-of-the-art,respectively.Compared with baselines which directly adopt a machine translation module,we find that both dual-channel and single-channel AdvNN significantly improve the performances(F1)of cross-lingual entity relation classification.Moreover,extensive analysis and discussion demonstrate the appropriateness and effectiveness of different parameter settings in our language adaptation framework.