Applying Occam’s Razor to Transformer-Based Dependency Parsing: What Works, What Doesn’t, and What is Really Necessary

Stefan Grünewald, Annemarie Friedrich, Jonas Kuhn


Abstract
The introduction of pre-trained transformer-based contextualized word embeddings has led to considerable improvements in the accuracy of graph-based parsers for frameworks such as Universal Dependencies (UD). However, previous works differ in various dimensions, including their choice of pre-trained language models and whether they use LSTM layers. With the aims of disentangling the effects of these choices and identifying a simple yet widely applicable architecture, we introduce STEPS, a new modular graph-based dependency parser. Using STEPS, we perform a series of analyses on the UD corpora of a diverse set of languages. We find that the choice of pre-trained embeddings has by far the greatest impact on parser performance and identify XLM-R as a robust choice across the languages in our study. Adding LSTM layers provides no benefits when using transformer-based embeddings. A multi-task training setup outputting additional UD features may contort results. Taking these insights together, we propose a simple but widely applicable parser architecture and configuration, achieving new state-of-the-art results (in terms of LAS) for 10 out of 12 diverse languages.
Anthology ID:
2021.iwpt-1.13
Volume:
Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Parsing Technologies and the IWPT 2021 Shared Task on Parsing into Enhanced Universal Dependencies (IWPT 2021)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Stephan Oepen, Kenji Sagae, Reut Tsarfaty, Gosse Bouma, Djamé Seddah, Daniel Zeman
Venue:
IWPT
SIG:
SIGPARSE
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
131–144
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.iwpt-1.13
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.iwpt-1.13
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Stefan Grünewald, Annemarie Friedrich, and Jonas Kuhn. 2021. Applying Occam’s Razor to Transformer-Based Dependency Parsing: What Works, What Doesn’t, and What is Really Necessary. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Parsing Technologies and the IWPT 2021 Shared Task on Parsing into Enhanced Universal Dependencies (IWPT 2021), pages 131–144, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Applying Occam’s Razor to Transformer-Based Dependency Parsing: What Works, What Doesn’t, and What is Really Necessary (Grünewald et al., IWPT 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.iwpt-1.13.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.iwpt-1.13.mp4