75 Languages, 1 Model: Parsing Universal Dependencies Universally

Dan Kondratyuk, Milan Straka


Abstract
We present UDify, a multilingual multi-task model capable of accurately predicting universal part-of-speech, morphological features, lemmas, and dependency trees simultaneously for all 124 Universal Dependencies treebanks across 75 languages. By leveraging a multilingual BERT self-attention model pretrained on 104 languages, we found that fine-tuning it on all datasets concatenated together with simple softmax classifiers for each UD task can meet or exceed state-of-the-art UPOS, UFeats, Lemmas, (and especially) UAS, and LAS scores, without requiring any recurrent or language-specific components. We evaluate UDify for multilingual learning, showing that low-resource languages benefit the most from cross-linguistic annotations. We also evaluate for zero-shot learning, with results suggesting that multilingual training provides strong UD predictions even for languages that neither UDify nor BERT have ever been trained on.
Anthology ID:
D19-1279
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2779–2795
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1279
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1279
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Dan Kondratyuk and Milan Straka. 2019. 75 Languages, 1 Model: Parsing Universal Dependencies Universally. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 2779–2795, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
75 Languages, 1 Model: Parsing Universal Dependencies Universally (Kondratyuk & Straka, EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1279.pdf
Code
 hyperparticle/udify +  additional community code
Data
Universal Dependencies