Using Word Embeddings to Translate Named Entities

Abstract

In this paper we investigate the usefulness of neural word embeddings in the process of translating Named Entities (NEs) from a resource-rich language to a language low on resources relevant to the task at hand, introducing a novel, yet simple way of obtaining bilingual word vectors. Inspired by observations in (Mikolov et al., 2013b), which show that training their word vector model on comparable corpora yields comparable vector space representations of those corpora, reducing the problem of translating words to finding a rotation matrix, and results in (Zou et al., 2013), which showed that bilingual word embeddings can improve Chinese Named Entity Recognition (NER) and English to Chinese phrase translation, we use the sentence-aligned English-French EuroParl corpora and show that word embeddings extracted from a merged corpus (corpus resulted from the merger of the two aligned corpora) can be used to NE translation. We extrapolate that word embeddings trained on merged parallel corpora are useful in Named Entity Recognition and Translation tasks for resource-poor languages.

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