Unsupervised Induction of Cross-Lingual Semantic Relations

Creating a language-independent meaning representation would benefit many crosslingual NLP tasks.We introduce the first unsupervised approach to this problem, learning clusters of semantically equivalent English and French relations between referring expressions, based on their named-entity arguments in large monolingual corpora.The clusters can be used as language-independent semantic relations, by mapping clustered expressions in different languages onto the same relation.Our approach needs no parallel text for training, but outperforms a baseline that uses machine translation on a cross-lingual question answering task.We also show how to use the semantics to improve the accuracy of machine translation, by using it in a simple reranker.