In this study, we investigate the effectiveness of using cross-lingual word embeddings for zero-shot transfer learning between a language with an abundant resource, English, and a language with limited resource, isiZulu. IsiZulu is a part of the South African Nguni language family, which is characterised by complex agglutinating morphology. We use VecMap, an open source tool, to obtain cross-lingual word embeddings. To perform an extrinsic evaluation of the effectiveness of the embeddings, we train a news classifier on labelled English data in order to categorise unlabelled isiZulu data using zero-shot transfer learning. In our study,
we found our model to have a weighted average F1-score of 0.34. Our findings demonstrate that VecMap generates modular word embeddings in the cross-lingual space that have an impact on the downstream classifier used for zero-shot
transfer learning.

Unsupervised Cross-lingual Word Embedding Representation for English-isiZulu

**Organizers:** 
Rooweither Mabuya, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR), South Africa
Don Mthobela, Cam Foundation
Mmasibidi Setaka, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR), South Africa
Menno van Zaanen, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR), South Africa For more details, please visit our [workshop website](https://sadilar.org/index.php/en/2/374)

The fourth workshop on Resources for African Indigenous Languages (RAIL)

workshop paper

### Welcome to the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) 
Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL had selected the Ukrainian community for the 16th EACL, which took place online due to the COVID pandemic. Unfortunately, the ongoing war made the organisation in Kyiv impossible. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, especially after the restrictions imposed by the COVID pandemic, in addition to an online mode, the conference will be held in Dubrovnik, Croatia, from 2 to 6 of May, 2023. The original aim of strengthening the connection with the Ukrainian community will not change as our program will feature a dedicated session and a workshop to highlight work on Ukrainian language technologies. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

You need to register for the conference in order to access this site. Please visit https://2023.eacl.org/registration for more information.

EACL 2023

As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

Jade Abbot

1

2

SHORT BIO

OTHER AFFILIATIONS

Presentations

Unsupervised Cross-lingual Word Embedding Representation for English-isiZulu

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES