Cross-lingual AMR Aligner: Paying Attention to Cross-Attention

Abelardo Carlos Martínez Lorenzo, ‪Pere-Lluís Huguet Cabot, Roberto Navigli

Findings: Semantics: Sentence-level Semantics, Textual Inference, and Other Areas Findings Paper

Session 1: Semantics: Sentence-level Semantics, Textual Inference, and Other Areas (Virtual Poster)
Conference Room: Pier 7&8
Conference Time: July 10, 11:00-12:30 (EDT) (America/Toronto)
Global Time: July 10, Session 1 (15:00-16:30 UTC)
Keywords: phrase/sentence embedding, word/phrase alignment
TLDR: This paper introduces a novel aligner for Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) graphs that can scale cross-lingually, and is thus capable of aligning units and spans in sentences of different languages. Our approach leverages modern Transformer-based parsers, which inherently encode alignment infor...
You can open the #paper-P3705 channel in a separate window.
Abstract: This paper introduces a novel aligner for Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) graphs that can scale cross-lingually, and is thus capable of aligning units and spans in sentences of different languages. Our approach leverages modern Transformer-based parsers, which inherently encode alignment information in their cross-attention weights, allowing us to extract this information during parsing. This eliminates the need for English-specific rules or the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm that have been used in previous approaches. In addition, we propose a guided supervised method using alignment to further enhance the performance of our aligner. We achieve state-of-the-art results in the benchmarks for AMR alignment and demonstrate our aligner's ability to obtain them across multiple languages. Our code will be available at [https://www.github.com/babelscape/AMR-alignment](https://www.github.com/babelscape/AMR-alignment).