Probing for Labeled Dependency Trees

Max Müller-Eberstein, Rob van der Goot, Barbara Plank


Abstract
Probing has become an important tool for analyzing representations in Natural Language Processing (NLP). For graphical NLP tasks such as dependency parsing, linear probes are currently limited to extracting undirected or unlabeled parse trees which do not capture the full task. This work introduces DepProbe, a linear probe which can extract labeled and directed dependency parse trees from embeddings while using fewer parameters and compute than prior methods. Leveraging its full task coverage and lightweight parametrization, we investigate its predictive power for selecting the best transfer language for training a full biaffine attention parser. Across 13 languages, our proposed method identifies the best source treebank 94% of the time, outperforming competitive baselines and prior work. Finally, we analyze the informativeness of task-specific subspaces in contextual embeddings as well as which benefits a full parser’s non-linear parametrization provides.
Anthology ID:
2022.acl-long.532
Volume:
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
May
Year:
2022
Address:
Dublin, Ireland
Editors:
Smaranda Muresan, Preslav Nakov, Aline Villavicencio
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7711–7726
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.532
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.532
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Max Müller-Eberstein, Rob van der Goot, and Barbara Plank. 2022. Probing for Labeled Dependency Trees. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 7711–7726, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Probing for Labeled Dependency Trees (Müller-Eberstein et al., ACL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.532.pdf
Software:
 2022.acl-long.532.software.tgz
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.532.mp4
Code
 personads/depprobe
Data
Universal Dependencies