Multi-source synthetic treebank creation for improved cross-lingual dependency parsing

Francis Tyers, Mariya Sheyanova, Aleksandra Martynova, Pavel Stepachev, Konstantin Vinogorodskiy


Abstract
This paper describes a method of creating synthetic treebanks for cross-lingual dependency parsing using a combination of machine translation (including pivot translation), annotation projection and the spanning tree algorithm. Sentences are first automatically translated from a lesser-resourced language to a number of related highly-resourced languages, parsed and then the annotations are projected back to the lesser-resourced language, leading to multiple trees for each sentence from the lesser-resourced language. The final treebank is created by merging the possible trees into a graph and running the spanning tree algorithm to vote for the best tree for each sentence. We present experiments aimed at parsing Faroese using a combination of Danish, Swedish and Norwegian. In a similar experimental setup to the CoNLL 2018 shared task on dependency parsing we report state-of-the-art results on dependency parsing for Faroese using an off-the-shelf parser.
Anthology ID:
W18-6017
Volume:
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW 2018)
Month:
November
Year:
2018
Address:
Brussels, Belgium
Editors:
Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Teresa Lynn, Sebastian Schuster
Venue:
UDW
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
144–150
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/build-pipeline-with-new-library/W18-6017/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W18-6017
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Francis Tyers, Mariya Sheyanova, Aleksandra Martynova, Pavel Stepachev, and Konstantin Vinogorodskiy. 2018. Multi-source synthetic treebank creation for improved cross-lingual dependency parsing. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW 2018), pages 144–150, Brussels, Belgium. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Multi-source synthetic treebank creation for improved cross-lingual dependency parsing (Tyers et al., UDW 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/build-pipeline-with-new-library/W18-6017.pdf
Code
 ftyers/cross-lingual-parsing +  additional community code
Data
Universal Dependencies