Slang is a predominant form of informal language making flexible and extended use of words that is notoriously hard for natural language processing systems to interpret. Existing approaches to slang interpretation tend to rely on context but ignore semantic extensions common in slang word usage. We propose a semantically informed slang interpretation (SSI) framework that considers jointly the contextual and semantic appropriateness of a candidate interpretation for a query slang. We perform rigorous evaluation on two large-scale online slang dictionaries and show that our approach not only achieves state-of-the-art accuracy for slang interpretation in English, but also does so in zero-shot and few-shot scenarios where training data is sparse. Furthermore, we show how the same framework can be applied to enhancing machine translation of slang from English to other languages. Our work creates opportunities for the automated interpretation and translation of informal language.
翻译:Slang是非正式语言的主要形式,它灵活和扩展地使用语言,对自然语言处理系统来说,这种语言的解释十分困难。现有的语义解释方法往往依赖上下文,但忽视了语义使用中常见的语义扩展。我们提议了一个语义上知情的语义解释(SSI)框架,这一框架可以共同考虑对语义进行候选人翻译的背景和语义上的适当性。我们对两个大型在线语义进行了严格的评价,并表明我们的方法不仅在英语的语义解释方面达到了最先进的准确性,而且在培训数据稀少的零点和少见的场景中也是如此。此外,我们展示了如何将同样的框架用于加强语义从英语到其他语言的机器翻译。我们的工作为非正式语言的自动口译和翻译创造了机会。