Low-Resource Parsing with Crosslingual Contextualized Representations

Phoebe Mulcaire, Jungo Kasai, Noah A. Smith


Abstract
Despite advances in dependency parsing, languages with small treebanks still present challenges. We assess recent approaches to multilingual contextual word representations (CWRs), and compare them for crosslingual transfer from a language with a large treebank to a language with a small or nonexistent treebank, by sharing parameters between languages in the parser itself. We experiment with a diverse selection of languages in both simulated and truly low-resource scenarios, and show that multilingual CWRs greatly facilitate low-resource dependency parsing even without crosslingual supervision such as dictionaries or parallel text. Furthermore, we examine the non-contextual part of the learned language models (which we call a “decontextual probe”) to demonstrate that polyglot language models better encode crosslingual lexical correspondence compared to aligned monolingual language models. This analysis provides further evidence that polyglot training is an effective approach to crosslingual transfer.
Anthology ID:
K19-1029
Volume:
Proceedings of the 23rd Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Mohit Bansal, Aline Villavicencio
Venue:
CoNLL
SIG:
SIGNLL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
304–315
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/K19-1029
DOI:
10.18653/v1/K19-1029
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Phoebe Mulcaire, Jungo Kasai, and Noah A. Smith. 2019. Low-Resource Parsing with Crosslingual Contextualized Representations. In Proceedings of the 23rd Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL), pages 304–315, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Low-Resource Parsing with Crosslingual Contextualized Representations (Mulcaire et al., CoNLL 2019)
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