Language Transfer Learning for Supervised Lexical Substitution

We propose a framework for lexical substitution that is able to perform transfer learning across languages. Datasets for this task are available in at least three languages (English, Italian, and German). Previous work has addressed each of these tasks in isolation. In contrast, we regard the union of three shared tasks as a combined multilingual dataset. We show that a supervised system can be trained effectively, even if training and evaluation data are from different languages. Successful transfer learning between languages suggests that the learned model is in fact independent of the underlying language. We combine state-of-the-art unsupervised features obtained from syntactic word embeddings and distributional thesauri in a supervised delexicalized ranking system. Our system improves over state of the art in the full lexical substitution task in all three languages.