Isomorphic Transfer of Syntactic Structures in Cross-Lingual NLP
Edoardo Maria Ponti, Roi Reichart, Anna Korhonen, Ivan Vulić
Abstract
The transfer or share of knowledge between languages is a potential solution to resource scarcity in NLP. However, the effectiveness of cross-lingual transfer can be challenged by variation in syntactic structures. Frameworks such as Universal Dependencies (UD) are designed to be cross-lingually consistent, but even in carefully designed resources trees representing equivalent sentences may not always overlap. In this paper, we measure cross-lingual syntactic variation, or anisomorphism, in the UD treebank collection, considering both morphological and structural properties. We show that reducing the level of anisomorphism yields consistent gains in cross-lingual transfer tasks. We introduce a source language selection procedure that facilitates effective cross-lingual parser transfer, and propose a typologically driven method for syntactic tree processing which reduces anisomorphism. Our results show the effectiveness of this method for both machine translation and cross-lingual sentence similarity, demonstrating the importance of syntactic structure compatibility for boosting cross-lingual transfer in NLP.- Anthology ID:
- P18-1142
- 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:
- 1531–1542
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/P18-1142
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/P18-1142
- Cite (ACL):
- Edoardo Maria Ponti, Roi Reichart, Anna Korhonen, and Ivan Vulić. 2018. Isomorphic Transfer of Syntactic Structures in Cross-Lingual NLP. In Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1531–1542, Melbourne, Australia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Isomorphic Transfer of Syntactic Structures in Cross-Lingual NLP (Ponti et al., ACL 2018)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/proper-vol2-ingestion/P18-1142.pdf
- Data
- Universal Dependencies