MultiTACRED: A Multilingual Version of the TAC Relation Extraction Dataset

Leonhard Hennig, Philippe Thomas, Sebastian Möller


Abstract
Relation extraction (RE) is a fundamental task in information extraction, whose extension to multilingual settings has been hindered by the lack of supervised resources comparable in size to large English datasets such as TACRED (Zhang et al., 2017). To address this gap, we introduce the MultiTACRED dataset, covering 12 typologically diverse languages from 9 language families, which is created by machine-translating TACRED instances and automatically projecting their entity annotations. We analyze translation and annotation projection quality, identify error categories, and experimentally evaluate fine-tuned pretrained mono- and multilingual language models in common transfer learning scenarios. Our analyses show that machine translation is a viable strategy to transfer RE instances, with native speakers judging more than 83% of the translated instances to be linguistically and semantically acceptable. We find monolingual RE model performance to be comparable to the English original for many of the target languages, and that multilingual models trained on a combination of English and target language data can outperform their monolingual counterparts. However, we also observe a variety of translation and annotation projection errors, both due to the MT systems and linguistic features of the target languages, such as pronoun-dropping, compounding and inflection, that degrade dataset quality and RE model performance.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.210
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3785–3801
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.210
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.210
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Leonhard Hennig, Philippe Thomas, and Sebastian Möller. 2023. MultiTACRED: A Multilingual Version of the TAC Relation Extraction Dataset. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 3785–3801, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MultiTACRED: A Multilingual Version of the TAC Relation Extraction Dataset (Hennig et al., ACL 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.210.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.210.mp4