Unsupervised Cross-lingual Word Embedding Representation for English-isiZulu

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.