Multitask and Multilingual Modelling for Lexical Analysis

Abstract: In NLP, one traditionally considers a single task (e.g. part-of-speech tagging) for a single language (e.g. English) at a time. However, recent work has shown that it can be beneficial to take advantage of relatedness between tasks, as well as between languages. In this work I examine the concept of relatedness and explore how it can be utilised to build NLP models that require less manually annotated data. A large selection of NLP tasks is investigated for a substantial language sample comprising 60 languages. The results show potential for joint multitask and multilingual modelling, and hints at linguistic insights which can be gained from such models.