We study dependency parsing for four Arabic dialects (Gulf, Levantine, Egyptian, and Maghrebi). Since no syntactically annotated data exist for Arabic dialects, we train the parser on a Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) corpus, which creates an out-of-domain setting.We investigate methods to close the gap between the source (MSA) and target data (dialects), e.g., by training on syntactically similar sentences to the test data. For testing, we manually annotate a small data set from a dialectal corpus. We focus on parsing two linguistic phenomena, which are difficult to parse: Idafa and coordination. We find that we can improve results by adding in-domain MSA data while adding dialectal embeddings only results in minor improvements.

Neural parsing is very dependent on the underlying language model. However, very little is known about how choices in the language model affect parsing performance, especially in multi-task learning. We investigate questions on how the choice of subwords affects parsing, how subword sharing is responsible for gains or negative transfer in a multi-task setting where each task is parsing of a specific domain of the same language. More specifically, we investigate these issues across four languages: English, German, Italian, and Turkish. We find a general preference for averaged or last subwords across languages and domains. However, specific POS tags may require different subwords, and the distributional overlap between subwords across domains is perhaps a more influential factor in determining positive or negative transfer than discrepancies in the data sizes.

We outline the ongoing development of the Indiana Parsed Corpus of (Historical) High German. Once completed, this corpus will fill the gap in Penn-style treebanks for Germanic languages by spanning High German from 1050 to 1950. This paper describes the process of building the corpus: selection of texts, decisions on part-of-speech tags and other labels, the process of annotation, and illustrative annotation issues unique to historical High German. The construction of the corpus has led to a refinement of the Penn labels, tailored to the particulars of this language.

In neural dependency parsing, as well as in the broader field of NLP, domain adaptation remains a challenging problem. When adapting a parser to a target domain, there is a fundamental tension between the need to make use of out-of-domain data and the need to ensure that syntactic characteristic of the target domain are learned. In this work we explore a way to balance these two competing concerns, namely using domain-weighted batch sampling, which allows us to use all available training data, while controlling the probability of sampling in- and out-of-domain data when constructing training batches. We conduct experiments using ten natural language domains and find that domain-weighted batch sampling yields substantial performance improvements in all ten domains compared to a baseline of conventional randomized batch sampling.

We describe our system for authorship attribution in the IARPA HIATUS program. We describe the model and compute infrastructure developed to satisfy the set of technical constraints imposed by IARPA, including runtime limits as well as other constraints related to the ultimate use case. One use-case constraint concerns the explainability of the features used in the system. For this reason, we integrate features from frame semantic parsing, as they are both interpretable and difficult for adversaries to evade. One trade-off with using such features, however, is that more sophisticated feature representations require more complicated architectures, which limit usefulness in time-sensitive and constrained compute environments. We propose an approach to increase the efficiency of frame semantic parsing through an analysis of parallelization and beam search sizes. Our approach results in a system that is approximately 8.37x faster than the base system with a minimal effect on accuracy.

We investigate approaches to classifying texts into either conspiracy theory or mainstream using the Language Of Conspiracy (LOCO) corpus. Since conspiracy theories are not monolithic constructs, we need to identify approaches that robustly work in an out-of- domain setting (i.e., across conspiracy topics). We investigate whether optimal in-domain set- tings can be transferred to out-of-domain set- tings, and we investigate different methods for bleaching to steer classifiers away from words typical for an individual conspiracy theory. We find that BART works better than an SVM, that we can successfully classify out-of-domain, but there are no clear trends in how to choose the best source training domains. Addition- ally, bleaching only topic words works better than bleaching all content words or completely delexicalizing texts.

Historical treebanking within the generative framework has gained in popularity. However, there are still many languages and historical periods yet to be represented. For German, a constituency treebank exists for historical Low German, but not Early New High German. We begin to fill this gap by presenting our initial work on the Parsed Corpus of Early New High German (PCENHG). We present the methodological considerations and workflow for the treebank’s annotations and development. Given the limited amount of currently available PCENHG treebank data, we treat it as a low-resource language and leverage a larger, closely related variety—Middle Low German—to build a parser to help facilitate faster post-annotation correction. We present an analysis on annotation speeds and conclude with a small pilot use-case, highlighting potential for future linguistic analyses. In doing so we highlight the value of the treebank’s development for historical linguistic analysis and demonstrate the benefits and challenges of developing a parser using two closely related historical Germanic varieties.

We investigate methods to develop a parser for Martinican Creole, a highly under-resourced language, using a French treebank. We compare transfer learning and multi-task learning models and examine different input features and strategies to handle the massive size imbalance between the treebanks. Surprisingly, we find that a simple concatenated (French + Martinican Creole) baseline yields optimal results even though it has access to only 80 Martinican Creole sentences. POS embeddings work better than lexical ones, but they suffer from negative transfer.

We investigate part of speech tagging for four Arabic dialects (Gulf, Levantine, Egyptian, and Maghrebi), in an out-of-domain setting. More specifically, we look at the effectiveness of 1) upsampling the target dialect in the training data of a joint model, 2) increasing the consistency of the annotations, and 3) using word embeddings pre-trained on a large corpus of dialectal Arabic. We increase the accuracy on average by about 20 percentage points.

Genre and domain are often used interchangeably, but are two different properties of a text. Successful parser adaptation requires both cross-domain and cross-genre sensitivity (Rehbein and Bildhauer, 2017). While the impact domain differences have on parser performance degradation is more easily measurable in respect to lexical differences, impact of genre differences can be more nuanced. With the predominance of pre-trained language models (LMs; e.g. BERT (Devlin et al., 2019)), there are now additional complexities in developing cross-genre sensitive models due to the infusion of linguistic characteristics derived from, usually, a third genre. We perform a systematic set of experiments using two neural constituency parsers to examine how different parsers behave in combination with different BERT models with varying source and target genres in English and Swedish. We find that there is extensive difficulty in predicting the best source due to the complex interactions between genres, parsers, and LMs. Additionally, the influence of the data used to derive the underlying BERT model heavily influences how best to create more robust and effective cross-genre parsing models.

Domain adaption in syntactic parsing is still a significant challenge. We address the issue of data imbalance between the in-domain and out-of-domain treebank typically used for the problem. We define domain adaptation as a Multi-task learning (MTL) problem, which allows us to train two parsers, one for each do-main. Our results show that the MTL approach is beneficial for the smaller treebank. For the larger treebank, we need to use loss weighting in order to avoid a decrease in performance be-low the single task. In order to determine towhat degree the data imbalance between two domains and the domain differences affect results, we also carry out an experiment with two imbalanced in-domain treebanks and show that loss weighting also improves performance in an in-domain setting. Given loss weighting in MTL, we can improve results for both parsers.

Abusive language detection has received much attention in the last years, and recent approaches perform the task in a number of different languages. We investigate which factors have an effect on multilingual settings, focusing on the compatibility of data and annotations. In the current paper, we focus on English and German. Our findings show large differences in performance between the two languages. We find that the best performance is achieved by different classification algorithms. Sampling to address class imbalance issues is detrimental for German and beneficial for English. The only similarity that we find is that neither data set shows clear topics when we compare the results of topic modeling to the gold standard. Based on our findings, we can conclude that a multilingual optimization of classifiers is not possible even in settings where comparable data sets are used.

We investigate parsing replicability across 7 languages (and 8 treebanks), showing that choices concerning the use of grammatical functions in parsing or evaluation, the influence of the rare word threshold, as well as choices in test sentences and evaluation script options have considerable and often unexpected effects on parsing accuracies. All of those choices need to be carefully documented if we want to ensure replicability.

Parsing Chinese critically depends on correct word segmentation for the parser since incorrect segmentation inevitably causes incorrect parses. We investigate a pipeline approach to segmentation and parsing using word lattices as parser input. We compare CRF-based and lexicon-based approaches to word segmentation. Our results show that the lattice parser is capable of selecting the correction segmentation from thousands of options, thus drastically reducing the number of unparsed sentence. Lexicon-based parsing models have a better coverage than the CRF-based approach, but the many options are more difficult to handle. We reach our best result by using a lexicon from the n-best CRF analyses, combined with highly probable words.