Twitter Universal Dependency Parsing for African-American and Mainstream American English

Su Lin Blodgett, Johnny Wei, Brendan O’Connor


Abstract
Due to the presence of both Twitter-specific conventions and non-standard and dialectal language, Twitter presents a significant parsing challenge to current dependency parsing tools. We broaden English dependency parsing to handle social media English, particularly social media African-American English (AAE), by developing and annotating a new dataset of 500 tweets, 250 of which are in AAE, within the Universal Dependencies 2.0 framework. We describe our standards for handling Twitter- and AAE-specific features and evaluate a variety of cross-domain strategies for improving parsing with no, or very little, in-domain labeled data, including a new data synthesis approach. We analyze these methods’ impact on performance disparities between AAE and Mainstream American English tweets, and assess parsing accuracy for specific AAE lexical and syntactic features. Our annotated data and a parsing model are available at: http://slanglab.cs.umass.edu/TwitterAAE/.
Anthology ID:
P18-1131
Volume:
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2018
Address:
Melbourne, Australia
Editors:
Iryna Gurevych, Yusuke Miyao
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1415–1425
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P18-1131
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P18-1131
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Su Lin Blodgett, Johnny Wei, and Brendan O’Connor. 2018. Twitter Universal Dependency Parsing for African-American and Mainstream American English. In Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1415–1425, Melbourne, Australia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Twitter Universal Dependency Parsing for African-American and Mainstream American English (Blodgett et al., ACL 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/P18-1131.pdf
Video:
 https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/P18-1131.mp4
Data
Universal Dependencies