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Improving Cross-lingual Transfer Learning for Turkish NLP

John Doe, Jane Smith, Alex Johnson

ACL 2023

Abstract

This paper presents a novel approach to improve cross-lingual transfer learning for Turkish natural language processing tasks. We demonstrate significant improvements in performance across multiple NLP tasks including named entity recognition, part-of-speech tagging, and sentiment analysis. Our method leverages morphological information specific to Turkish to enhance the transfer of knowledge from high-resource languages.

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Introduction

Cross-lingual transfer learning has emerged as a promising approach for improving natural language processing (NLP) performance in low-resource languages. However, languages with rich morphology, such as Turkish, present unique challenges for these methods. In this paper, we address these challenges by introducing a novel approach that explicitly incorporates morphological information into the transfer learning process.

Method

Our approach consists of three main components:

  1. A morphological analyzer specifically designed for Turkish
  2. A modified pre-training objective that accounts for morphological structures
  3. A cross-lingual alignment method that maps between morphologically rich and poor languages

Results

Our experiments demonstrate significant improvements over previous state-of-the-art methods:

Task Previous SOTA Our Method Improvement
NER 78.2% 83.5% +5.3%
POS 92.1% 94.7% +2.6%
SA 76.8% 81.2% +4.4%

Conclusion

The results demonstrate that explicitly modeling morphological information can substantially improve cross-lingual transfer learning for Turkish NLP tasks. Our approach can be extended to other morphologically rich languages, potentially benefiting a wide range of low-resource language processing scenarios.