XLTime: A Cross-Lingual Knowledge Transfer Framework for Temporal Expression Extraction

  • Yuwei Cao
  • , William Groves
  • , Tanay Kumar Saha
  • , Joel R. Tetreault
  • , Alex Jaimes
  • , Hao Peng
  • , Philip S. Yu

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Temporal Expression Extraction (TEE) is essential for understanding time in natural language. It has applications in Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks such as question answering, information retrieval, and causal inference. To date, work in this area has mostly focused on English as there is a scarcity of labeled data for other languages. We propose XLTime, a novel framework for multilingual TEE. XLTime works on top of pre-trained language models and leverages multi-task learning to prompt cross-language knowledge transfer both from English and within the non-English languages. XLTime alleviates problems caused by a shortage of data in the target language. We apply XLTime with different language models and show that it outperforms the previous automatic SOTA methods on French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Basque, by large margins. XLTime also closes the gap considerably on the handcrafted HeidelTime method.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationFindings of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Subtitle of host publicationNAACL 2022 - Findings
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages1931-1942
Number of pages12
ISBN (Electronic)9781955917766
DOIs
StatePublished - 2022
Event2022 Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022 - Seattle, United States
Duration: 10 Jul 202215 Jul 2022

Publication series

NameFindings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022 - Findings

Conference

Conference2022 Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySeattle
Period10/07/2215/07/22

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'XLTime: A Cross-Lingual Knowledge Transfer Framework for Temporal Expression Extraction'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this