Zero-resource Dependency Parsing: Boosting Delexicalized Cross-lingual Transfer with Linguistic Knowledge

Lauriane Aufrant, Guillaume Wisniewski, François Yvon


Abstract
This paper studies cross-lingual transfer for dependency parsing, focusing on very low-resource settings where delexicalized transfer is the only fully automatic option. We show how to boost parsing performance by rewriting the source sentences so as to better match the linguistic regularities of the target language. We contrast a data-driven approach with an approach relying on linguistically motivated rules automatically extracted from the World Atlas of Language Structures. Our findings are backed up by experiments involving 40 languages. They show that both approaches greatly outperform the baseline, the knowledge-driven method yielding the best accuracies, with average improvements of +2.9 UAS, and up to +90 UAS (absolute) on some frequent PoS configurations.
Anthology ID:
C16-1012
Volume:
Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers
Month:
December
Year:
2016
Address:
Osaka, Japan
Editors:
Yuji Matsumoto, Rashmi Prasad
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee
Note:
Pages:
119–130
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/C16-1012
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Lauriane Aufrant, Guillaume Wisniewski, and François Yvon. 2016. Zero-resource Dependency Parsing: Boosting Delexicalized Cross-lingual Transfer with Linguistic Knowledge. In Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers, pages 119–130, Osaka, Japan. The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee.
Cite (Informal):
Zero-resource Dependency Parsing: Boosting Delexicalized Cross-lingual Transfer with Linguistic Knowledge (Aufrant et al., COLING 2016)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ml4al-ingestion/C16-1012.pdf
Data
Universal Dependencies