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.