Phylogenic Multi-Lingual Dependency Parsing

Mathieu Dehouck, Pascal Denis


Abstract
Languages evolve and diverge over time. Their evolutionary history is often depicted in the shape of a phylogenetic tree. Assuming parsing models are representations of their languages grammars, their evolution should follow a structure similar to that of the phylogenetic tree. In this paper, drawing inspiration from multi-task learning, we make use of the phylogenetic tree to guide the learning of multi-lingual dependency parsers leveraging languages structural similarities. Experiments on data from the Universal Dependency project show that phylogenetic training is beneficial to low resourced languages and to well furnished languages families. As a side product of phylogenetic training, our model is able to perform zero-shot parsing of previously unseen languages.
Anthology ID:
N19-1017
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Jill Burstein, Christy Doran, Thamar Solorio
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
192–203
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1017
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-1017
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mathieu Dehouck and Pascal Denis. 2019. Phylogenic Multi-Lingual Dependency Parsing. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pages 192–203, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Phylogenic Multi-Lingual Dependency Parsing (Dehouck & Denis, NAACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1017.pdf