Choosing a transfer language is a crucial step in transfer learning. In much previous research on dependency parsing, related languages have successfully been used. However, when parsing Latin, it has been suggested that languages such as ancient Greek could be helpful. In this work we parse Latin in a low-resource scenario, with the main goal to investigate if Greek languages are more helpful for parsing Latin than related Italic languages, and show that this is indeed the case. We further investigate the influence of other factors including training set size and content as well as linguistic distances. We find that one explanatory factor seems to be the syntactic similarity between Latin and Ancient Greek. The influence of genres or shared annotation projects seems to have a smaller impact.

Science, technology and innovation (STI) policies have evolved in the past decade. We are now progressing towards policies that are more aligned with sustainable development through integrating social, economic and environmental dimensions. In this new policy environment, the need to keep track of innovation from its conception in Science and Research has emerged. Argumentation mining, an interdisciplinary NLP field, gives rise to the required technologies. In this study, we present the first STI-driven multidisciplinary corpus of scientific abstracts annotated for argumentative units (AUs) on the sustainable development goals (SDGs) set by the United Nations (UN). AUs are the sentences conveying the Claim(s) reported in the author’s original research and the Evidence provided for support. We also present a set of strong, BERT-based neural baselines achieving an f1-score of 70.0 for Claim and 62.4 for Evidence identification evaluated with 10-fold cross-validation. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our models, we experiment with different test sets showing comparable performance across various SDG policy domains. Our dataset and models are publicly available for research purposes.