Multi-Modal Representations for Improved Bilingual Lexicon Learning

Recent work has revealed the potential of using visual representations for bilingual lexicon learning (BLL). Such image-based BLL methods, however, still fall short of linguistic approaches. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective multimodal approach that learns bilingual semantic representations that fuse linguistic and visual input. These new bilingual multi-modal embeddings display significant performance gains in the BLL task for three language pairs on two benchmarking test sets, outperforming linguistic-only BLL models using three different types of state-of-the-art bilingual word embeddings, as well as visual-only BLL models.This work is supported by ERC Consolidator Grant LEXICAL (648909) and KU Leuven Grant PDMK/14/117. SC is supported by ERC Starting Grant DisCoTex (306920)