This paper considers the task of parsing low-resource languages in a scenario where parallel English data and also a limited seed of annotated sentences in the target language are available, as for example in bootstrapping parallel treebanks. We focus on constituency parsing using Role and Reference Grammar (RRG), a theory that has so far been understudied in computational linguistics but that is widely used in typological research, i.e., in particular in the context of low-resource languages. Starting from an existing RRG parser, we propose two strategies for low-resource parsing: first, we extend the parsing model into a cross-lingual parser, exploiting the parallel data in the high-resource language and unsupervised word alignments by providing internal states of the source-language parser to the target-language parser. Second, we adopt self-training, thereby iteratively expanding the training data, starting from the seed, by including the most confident new parses in each round. Both in simulated scenarios and with a real low-resource language (Daakaka), we find substantial and complementary improvements from both self-training and cross-lingual parsing. Moreover, we also experimented with using gloss embeddings in addition to token embeddings in the target language, and this also improves results. Finally, starting from what we have for Daakaka, we also consider parsing a related language (Dalkalaen) where glosses and English translations are available but no annotated trees at all, i.e., a no-resource scenario wrt. syntactic annotations. We start with cross-lingual parser trained on Daakaka with glosses and use self-training to adapt it to Dalkalaen. The results are surprisingly good.

Supervised disambiguation of verbal idioms (VID) poses special demands on the quality and quantity of the annotated data used for learning and evaluation. In this paper, we present a new VID corpus for German and perform a series of VID disambiguation experiments on it. Our best classifier, based on a neural architecture, yields an error reduction across VIDs of 57% in terms of accuracy compared to a simple majority baseline.

This paper describes a manually annotated corpus of verbal multi-word expressions in Polish. It is among the 4 biggest datasets in release 1.2 of the PARSEME multiligual corpus. We describe the data sources, as well as the annotation process and its outcomes. We also present interesting phenomena encountered during the annotation task and put forward enhancements for the PARSEME annotation guidelines.

We present edition 1.2 of the PARSEME shared task on identification of verbal multiword expressions (VMWEs). Lessons learned from previous editions indicate that VMWEs have low ambiguity, and that the major challenge lies in identifying test instances never seen in the training data. Therefore, this edition focuses on unseen VMWEs. We have split annotated corpora so that the test corpora contain around 300 unseen VMWEs, and we provide non-annotated raw corpora to be used by complementary discovery methods. We released annotated and raw corpora in 14 languages, and this semi-supervised challenge attracted 7 teams who submitted 9 system results. This paper describes the effort of corpus creation, the task design, and the results obtained by the participating systems, especially their performance on unseen expressions.

This paper describes Contemplata, an annotation platform that offers a generic solution for treebank building as well as treebank enrichment with relations between syntactic nodes. Contemplata is dedicated to the annotation of constituency trees. The framework includes support for syntactic parsers, which provide automatic annotations to be manually revised. The balanced strategy of annotation between automatic parsing and manual revision allows to reduce the annotator workload, which favours data reliability. The paper presents the software architecture of Contemplata, describes its practical use and eventually gives two examples of annotation projects that were conducted on the platform.

We describe an approach to statistical parsing with Tree-Wrapping Grammars (TWG). TWG is a tree-rewriting formalism which includes the tree-combination operations of substitution, sister-adjunction and tree-wrapping substitution. TWGs can be extracted from constituency treebanks and aim at representing long distance dependencies (LDDs) in a linguistically adequate way. We present a parsing algorithm for TWGs based on neural supertagging and A* parsing. We extract a TWG for English from the treebanks for Role and Reference Grammar and discuss first parsing results with this grammar.

We propose to tackle the problem of verbal multiword expression (VMWE) identification using a neural graph parsing-based approach. Our solution involves encoding VMWE annotations as labellings of dependency trees and, subsequently, applying a neural network to model the probabilities of different labellings. This strategy can be particularly effective when applied to discontinuous VMWEs and, thanks to dense, pre-trained word vector representations, VMWEs unseen during training. Evaluation of our approach on three PARSEME datasets (German, French, and Polish) shows that it allows to achieve performance on par with the previous state-of-the-art (Al Saied et al., 2018).

This paper describes a system submitted to the closed track of the PARSEME shared task (edition 1.1) on automatic identification of verbal multiword expressions (VMWEs). The system represents VMWE identification as a labeling task where one of two labels (MWE or not-MWE) must be predicted for each node in the dependency tree based on local context, including adjacent nodes and their labels. The system relies on multiclass logistic regression to determine the globally optimal labeling of a tree. The system ranked 1st in the general cross-lingual ranking of the closed track systems, according to both official evaluation measures: MWE-based F1 and token-based F1.

Multiword expressions (MWEs) are linguistic objects containing two or more words and showing idiosyncratic behavior at different levels. Treebanks with annotated MWEs enable studies of such properties, as well as training and evaluation of MWE-aware parsers. However, few treebanks contain full-fledged MWE annotations. We show how this gap can be bridged in Polish by projecting 3 MWE resources on a constituency treebank.

Multiword expressions (MWEs) are pervasive in natural languages and often have both idiomatic and compositional readings, which leads to high syntactic ambiguity. We show that for some MWE types idiomatic readings are usually the correct ones. We propose a heuristic for an A* parser for Tree Adjoining Grammars which benefits from this knowledge by promoting MWE-oriented analyses. This strategy leads to a substantial reduction in the parsing search space in case of true positive MWE occurrences, while avoiding parsing failures in case of false positives.

We present the named entity annotation task within the on-going project of the National Corpus of Polish. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt at a large-scale corpus annotation of Polish named entities. We describe the scope and the TEI-inspired hierarchy of named entities admitted for this task, as well as the TEI-conformant multi-level stand-off annotation format. We also discuss some methodological strategies including the annotation of embedded, coordinated and discontinuous names. Our annotation platform consists of two main tools interconnected by converting facilities. A rule-based natural language processing platform SProUT is used for the automatic pre-annotation of named entities, due to the previously created Polish extraction grammars adapted to the annotation task. A customizable graphical tree editor TrEd, extended to our needs, provides an ergonomic environment for manual correction of annotations. Despite some difficult cases encountered in the early annotation phase, about 2,600 named entities in 1,800 corpus sentences have presently been annotated, which allowed to validate the project methodology and tools.