Abstract
We explore the link between the extent to which syntactic relations are preserved in translation and the ease of correctly constructing a parse tree in a zero-shot setting. While previous work suggests such a relation, it tends to focus on the macro level and not on the level of individual edges—a gap we aim to address. As a test case, we take the transfer of Universal Dependencies (UD) parsing from English to a diverse set of languages and conduct two sets of experiments. In one, we analyze zero-shot performance based on the extent to which English source edges are preserved in translation. In another, we apply three linguistically motivated transformations to UD, creating more cross-lingually stable versions of it, and assess their zero-shot parsability. In order to compare parsing performance across different schemes, we perform extrinsic evaluation on the downstream task of cross-lingual relation extraction (RE) using a subset of a standard English RE benchmark translated to Russian and Korean. In both sets of experiments, our results suggest a strong relation between cross-lingual stability and zero-shot parsing performance.- Anthology ID:
- 2021.emnlp-main.394
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
- Month:
- November
- Year:
- 2021
- Address:
- Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
- Editors:
- Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
- Venue:
- EMNLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 4803–4817
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.394
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.394
- Cite (ACL):
- Ofir Arviv, Dmitry Nikolaev, Taelin Karidi, and Omri Abend. 2021. On the Relation between Syntactic Divergence and Zero-Shot Performance. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 4803–4817, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- On the Relation between Syntactic Divergence and Zero-Shot Performance (Arviv et al., EMNLP 2021)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-1/2021.emnlp-main.394.pdf
- Code
- ofirarviv/improving-ud
- Data
- Translated TACRED, Universal Dependencies