What is the improvement in performance for Estonian in the NER task?
5 percent points.
Recent results show that deep neural networks using contextual embeddings significantly outperform non-contextual embeddings on a majority of text classification task. We offer precomputed embeddings from popular contextual ELMo model for seven languages: Croatian, Estonian, Finnish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Slovenian, and Swedish. We demonstrate that the quality of embeddings strongly depends on the size of training set and show that existing publicly available ELMo embeddings for listed languages shall be improved. We train new ELMo embeddings on much larger training sets and show their advantage over baseline non-contextual FastText embeddings. In evaluation, we use two benchmarks, the analogy task and the NER task.
Word embeddings are representations of words in numerical form, as vectors of typically several hundred dimensions. The vectors are used as an input to machine learning models; for complex language processing tasks these are typically deep neural networks. The embedding vectors are obtained from specialized learning tasks, based on neural networks, e.g., word2vec BIBREF0, GloVe BIBREF1, FastText BIBREF2, ELMo BIBREF3, and BERT BIBREF4. For training, the embeddings algorithms use large monolingual corpora that encode important information about word meaning as distances between vectors. In order to enable downstream machine learning on text understanding tasks, the embeddings shall preserve semantic relations between words, and this is true even across languages. Probably the best known word embeddings are produced by the word2vec method BIBREF5. The problem with word2vec embeddings is their failure to express polysemous words. During training of an embedding, all senses of a given word (e.g., paper as a material, as a newspaper, as a scientific work, and as an exam) contribute relevant information in proportion to their frequency in the training corpus. This causes the final vector to be placed somewhere in the weighted middle of all words' meanings. Consequently, rare meanings of words are poorly expressed with word2vec and the resulting vectors do not offer good semantic representations. For example, none of the 50 closest vectors of the word paper is related to science. The idea of contextual embeddings is to generate a different vector for each context a word appears in and the context is typically defined sentence-wise. To a large extent, this solves the problems with word polysemy, i.e. the context of a sentence is typically enough to disambiguate different meanings of a word for humans and so it is for the learning algorithms. In this work, we describe high-quality models for contextual embeddings, called ELMo BIBREF3, precomputed for seven morphologically rich, less-resourced languages: Slovenian, Croatian, Finnish, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Swedish. ELMo is one of the most successful approaches to contextual word embeddings. At time of its creation, ELMo has been shown to outperform previous word embeddings BIBREF3 like word2vec and GloVe on many NLP tasks, e.g., question answering, named entity extraction, sentiment analysis, textual entailment, semantic role labeling, and coreference resolution. This report is split into further five sections. In section SECREF2, we describe the contextual embeddings ELMo. In Section SECREF3, we describe the datasets used and in Section SECREF4 we describe preprocessing and training of the embeddings. We describe the methodology for evaluation of created vectors and results in Section SECREF5. We present conclusion in Section SECREF6 where we also outline plans for further work.