Transition-based parsers implemented with Pointer Networks have become the new state of the art in dependency parsing, excelling in producing labelled syntactic trees and outperforming graph-based models in this task. In order to further test the capabilities of these powerful neural networks on a harder NLP problem, we propose a transition system that, thanks to Pointer Networks, can straightforwardly produce labelled directed acyclic graphs and perform semantic dependency parsing. In addition, we enhance our approach with deep contextualized word embeddings extracted from BERT. The resulting system not only outperforms all existing transition-based models, but also matches the best fully-supervised accuracy to date on the SemEval 2015 Task 18 English datasets among previous state-of-the-art graph-based parsers.
Dependency parsing is a crucial step towards deep language understanding and, therefore, widely demanded by numerous Natural Language Processing applications. In particular, left-to-right and top-down transition-based algorithms that rely on Pointer Networks are among the most accurate approaches for performing dependency parsing. Additionally, it has been observed for the top-down algorithm that Pointer Networks' sequential decoding can be improved by implementing a hierarchical variant, more adequate to model dependency structures. Considering all this, we develop a bottom-up-oriented Hierar…
Universidade da Coruña（拉科鲁尼亚大学）；CITIC；FASTPARSE Lab（FASTPARSE实验室）；LyS Group（LyS小组）
One of the most complex syntactic representations used in computational linguistics and NLP are discontinuous constituent trees, crucial for representing all grammatical phenomena of languages such as German. Recent advances in dependency parsing have shown that Pointer Networks excel in efficiently parsing syntactic relations between words in a sentence. This kind of sequence-to-sequence models achieve outstanding accuracies in building non-projective dependency trees, but its potential has not been proved yet on a more difficult task. We propose a novel neural network architecture that, by m…
Universidade da Coruña（拉科鲁尼亚大学）；FASTPARSE Lab（FASTPARSE实验室）；LyS Group（LyS研究组）；CITIC（CITIC研究中心）
We propose a novel transition-based algorithm that straightforwardly parses sentences from left to right by building $n$ attachments, with $n$ being the length of the input sentence. Similarly to the recent stack-pointer parser by Ma et al. (2018), we use the pointer network framework that, given a word, can directly point to a position from the sentence. However, our left-to-right approach is simpler than the original top-down stack-pointer parser (not requiring a stack) and reduces transition sequence length in half, from 2$n$-1 actions to $n$. This results in a quadratic non-projective pars…
Syntactic and semantic parsing has been investigated for decades, which is one primary topic in the natural language processing community. This article aims for a brief survey on this topic. The parsing community includes many tasks, which are difficult to be covered fully. Here we focus on two of the most popular formalizations of parsing: constituent parsing and dependency parsing. Constituent parsing is majorly targeted to syntactic analysis, and dependency parsing can handle both syntactic and semantic analysis. This article briefly reviews the representative models of constituent parsing …
Dependency parsing is an important NLP task. A popular approach for dependency parsing is structured perceptron. Still, graph-based dependency parsing has the time complexity of $O(n^3)$, and it suffers from slow training. To deal with this problem, we propose a parallel algorithm called parallel perceptron. The parallel algorithm can make full use of a multi-core computer which saves a lot of training time. Based on experiments we observe that dependency parsing with parallel perceptron can achieve 8-fold faster training speed than traditional structured perceptron methods when using 10 threa…
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Alibaba DAMO Academy, Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴达摩院，阿里巴巴集团）；ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）
Syntactic dependency parsing is an important task in natural language processing. Unsupervised dependency parsing aims to learn a dependency parser from sentences that have no annotation of their correct parse trees. Despite its difficulty, unsupervised parsing is an interesting research direction because of its capability of utilizing almost unlimited unannotated text data. It also serves as the basis for other research in low-resource parsing. In this paper, we survey existing approaches to unsupervised dependency parsing, identify two major classes of approaches, and discuss recent trends. …
Department of Information Science；Engineering University of Information Technology\ National University -- Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam Email；Faculty of Computer Science\ of Information Technology\ National University -- Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam Email
Dependency parsing is needed in different applications of natural language processing. In this paper, we present a thorough error analysis for dependency parsing for the Vietnamese language, using two state-of-the-art parsers: MSTParser and MaltParser. The error analysis results provide us insights in order to improve the performance of dependency parsing for the Vietnamese language.
While part-of-speech (POS) tagging and dependency parsing are observed to be closely related, existing work on joint modeling with manually crafted feature templates suffers from the feature sparsity and incompleteness problems. In this paper, we propose an approach to joint POS tagging and dependency parsing using transition-based neural networks. Three neural network based classifiers are designed to resolve shift/reduce, tagging, and labeling conflicts. Experiments show that our approach significantly outperforms previous methods for joint POS tagging and dependency parsing across a variety…
Dependency parsing is one of the important natural language processing tasks that assigns syntactic trees to texts. Due to the wider availability of dependency corpora and improved parsing and machine learning techniques, parsing accuracies of supervised learning-based systems have been significantly improved. However, due to the nature of supervised learning, those parsing systems highly rely on the manually annotated training corpora. They work reasonably good on the in-domain data but the performance drops significantly when tested on out-of-domain texts. To bridge the performance gap betwe…
An effective recipe for building seq2seq, non-autoregressive, task-oriented parsers to map utterances to semantic frames proceeds in three steps: encoding an utterance $x$, predicting a frame's length |y|, and decoding a |y|-sized frame with utterance and ontology tokens. Though empirically strong, these models are typically bottlenecked by length prediction, as even small inaccuracies change the syntactic and semantic characteristics of resulting frames. In our work, we propose span pointer networks, non-autoregressive parsers which shift the decoding task from text generation to span predict…
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；University of Southern California（南加利福尼亚大学）
We introduce a novel architecture for dependency parsing: \emph{stack-pointer networks} (\textbf{\textsc{StackPtr}}). Combining pointer networks~\citep{vinyals2015pointer} with an internal stack, the proposed model first reads and encodes the whole sentence, then builds the dependency tree top-down (from root-to-leaf) in a depth-first fashion. The stack tracks the status of the depth-first search and the pointer networks select one child for the word at the top of the stack at each step. The \textsc{StackPtr} parser benefits from the information of the whole sentence and all previously derived…
School of Information Science and Technology（信息科学与技术学院）；ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）
Unsupervised dependency parsing, which tries to discover linguistic dependency structures from unannotated data, is a very challenging task. Almost all previous work on this task focuses on learning generative models. In this paper, we develop an unsupervised dependency parsing model based on the CRF autoencoder. The encoder part of our model is discriminative and globally normalized which allows us to use rich features as well as universal linguistic priors. We propose an exact algorithm for parsing as well as a tractable learning algorithm. We evaluated the performance of our model on eight …
Gamification approaches have been used as a way for creating language resources for NLP. It is also used for presenting and teaching the algorithms in NLP and linguistic phenomena. This paper argues about a design of gamification for Japanese syntactic dependendency parsing for the latter objective. The user interface design is based on a transition-based shift reduce dependency parsing which needs only two actions of SHIFT (not attach) and REDUCE (attach) in Japanese dependency structure. We assign the two actions for two-way directional control on a gamepad or other devices. We also design t…
University College London（伦敦大学学院）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）
In this work, we explore the novel idea of employing dependency parsing information in the context of few-shot learning, the task of learning the meaning of a rare word based on a limited amount of context sentences. Firstly, we use dependency-based word embedding models as background spaces for few-shot learning. Secondly, we introduce two few-shot learning methods which enhance the additive baseline model by using dependencies.
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Twentieth Century Fox（二十世纪福克斯公司）；Starfleet Academy（星际舰队学院）；Tyrell Inc.（泰瑞尔公司）
In Vietnamese dependency parsing, several methods have been proposed. Dependency parser which uses deep neural network model has been reported that achieved state-of-the-art results. In this paper, we proposed a new method which applies LSTM easy-first dependency parsing with pre-trained word embeddings and character-level word embeddings. Our method achieves an accuracy of 80.91% of unlabeled attachment score and 72.98% of labeled attachment score on the Vietnamese Dependency Treebank (VnDT).
In this paper, we introduce a novel approach based on a bidirectional recurrent autoencoder to perform globally optimized non-projective dependency parsing via semi-supervised learning. The syntactic analysis is completed at the end of the neural process that generates a Latent Heads Representation (LHR), without any algorithmic constraint and with a linear complexity. The resulting "latent syntactic structure" can be used directly in other semantic tasks. The LHR is transformed into the usual dependency tree computing a simple vectors similarity. We believe that our model has the potential to…
This paper presents generalized probabilistic models for high-order projective dependency parsing and an algorithmic framework for learning these statistical models involving dependency trees. Partition functions and marginals for high-order dependency trees can be computed efficiently, by adapting our algorithms which extend the inside-outside algorithm to higher-order cases. To show the effectiveness of our algorithms, we perform experiments on three languages---English, Chinese and Czech, using maximum conditional likelihood estimation for model training and L-BFGS for parameter estimation.…
Standard models for syntactic dependency parsing take words to be the elementary units that enter into dependency relations. In this paper, we investigate whether there are any benefits from enriching these models with the more abstract notion of nucleus proposed by Tesnière. We do this by showing how the concept of nucleus can be defined in the framework of Universal Dependencies and how we can use composition functions to make a transition-based dependency parser aware of this concept. Experiments on 12 languages show that nucleus composition gives small but significant improvements in parsi…
Department of Information Science；Engineering University of Information Technology Vietnam National University - Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam Email；Faculty of Computer Science University of Information Technology Vietnam National University - Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam Email
In recent years, dependency parsing is a fascinating research topic and has a lot of applications in natural language processing. In this paper, we present an effective approach to improve dependency parsing by utilizing supertag features. We performed experiments with the transition-based dependency parsing approach because it can take advantage of rich features. Empirical evaluation on Vietnamese Dependency Treebank showed that, we achieved an improvement of 18.92% in labeled attachment score with gold supertags and an improvement of 3.57% with automatic supertags.
ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）；Shanghai Engineering Research Center of Intelligent Vision and Imaging（上海智能视觉影像工程研究中心）
We propose a new method for projective dependency parsing based on headed spans. In a projective dependency tree, the largest subtree rooted at each word covers a contiguous sequence (i.e., a span) in the surface order. We call such a span marked by a root word \textit{headed span}. A projective dependency tree can be represented as a collection of headed spans. We decompose the score of a dependency tree into the scores of the headed spans and design a novel $O(n^3)$ dynamic programming algorithm to enable global training and exact inference. Our model achieves state-of-the-art or competitive…
McGill University（麦吉尔大学）；Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute (Mila)（魁北克人工智能研究所（Mila））；ServiceNow Research（ServiceNow研究院）；Facebook（脸书）
Compositionality -- the ability to combine familiar units like words into novel phrases and sentences -- has been the focus of intense interest in artificial intelligence in recent years. To test compositional generalization in semantic parsing, Keysers et al. (2020) introduced Compositional Freebase Queries (CFQ). This dataset maximizes the similarity between the test and train distributions over primitive units, like words, while maximizing the compound divergence: the dissimilarity between test and train distributions over larger structures, like phrases. Dependency parsing, however, lacks …
We study the effect of rich supertag features in greedy transition-based dependency parsing. While previous studies have shown that sparse boolean features representing the 1-best supertag of a word can improve parsing accuracy, we show that we can get further improvements by adding a continuous vector representation of the entire supertag distribution for a word. In this way, we achieve the best results for greedy transition-based parsing with supertag features with $88.6\%$ LAS and $90.9\%$ UASon the English Penn Treebank converted to Stanford Dependencies.
We present a novel neural network model that learns POS tagging and graph-based dependency parsing jointly. Our model uses bidirectional LSTMs to learn feature representations shared for both POS tagging and dependency parsing tasks, thus handling the feature-engineering problem. Our extensive experiments, on 19 languages from the Universal Dependencies project, show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art neural network-based Stack-propagation model for joint POS tagging and transition-based dependency parsing, resulting in a new state of the art. Our code is open-source and available…
School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University（印第安纳大学信息与计算学院）
In principle, the design of transition-based dependency parsers makes it possible to experiment with any general-purpose classifier without other changes to the parsing algorithm. In practice, however, it often takes substantial software engineering to bridge between the different representations used by two software packages. Here we present extensions to MaltParser that allow the drop-in use of any classifier conforming to the interface of the Weka machine learning package, a wrapper for the TiMBL memory-based learner to this interface, and experiments on multilingual dependency parsing with…
The University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学）；VinAI Research（VinAI研究院）
We propose the first multi-task learning model for joint Vietnamese word segmentation, part-of-speech (POS) tagging and dependency parsing. In particular, our model extends the BIST graph-based dependency parser (Kiperwasser and Goldberg, 2016) with BiLSTM-CRF-based neural layers (Huang et al., 2015) for word segmentation and POS tagging. On Vietnamese benchmark datasets, experimental results show that our joint model obtains state-of-the-art or competitive performances.
This paper presents an empirical comparison of different dependency parsers for Vietnamese, which has some unusual characteristics such as copula drop and verb serialization. Experimental results show that the neural network-based parsers perform significantly better than the traditional parsers. We report the highest parsing scores published to date for Vietnamese with the labeled attachment score (LAS) at 73.53% and the unlabeled attachment score (UAS) at 80.66%.
Error propagation is a common problem in NLP. Reinforcement learning explores erroneous states during training and can therefore be more robust when mistakes are made early in a process. In this paper, we apply reinforcement learning to greedy dependency parsing which is known to suffer from error propagation. Reinforcement learning improves accuracy of both labeled and unlabeled dependencies of the Stanford Neural Dependency Parser, a high performance greedy parser, while maintaining its efficiency. We investigate the portion of errors which are the result of error propagation and confirm tha…
In this paper, we present an approach to improve the accuracy of a strong transition-based dependency parser by exploiting dependency language models that are extracted from a large parsed corpus. We integrated a small number of features based on the dependency language models into the parser. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we evaluate our parser on standard English and Chinese data where the base parser could achieve competitive accuracy scores. Our enhanced parser achieved state-of-the-art accuracy on Chinese data and competitive results on English data. We gained…
Huawei Cloud Computing Technologies（华为云计算技术）；Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University（清华大学计算机科学与技术系）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学人工智能学院）；School of Computer Science, Wuhan University（武汉大学计算机学院）
Dependency parsing aims to extract syntactic dependency structure or semantic dependency structure for sentences. Existing methods suffer the drawbacks of lacking universality or highly relying on the auxiliary decoder. To remedy these drawbacks, we propose to achieve universal and schema-free Dependency Parsing (DP) via Sequence Generation (SG) DPSG by utilizing only the pre-trained language model (PLM) without any auxiliary structures or parsing algorithms. We first explore different serialization designing strategies for converting parsing structures into sequences. Then we design dependenc…
ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）；Shanghai Engineering Research Center of Intelligent Vision and Imaging（上海智能视觉与成像工程研究中心）
Graph-based methods, which decompose the score of a dependency tree into scores of dependency arcs, are popular in dependency parsing for decades. Recently, \citet{Yang2022Span} propose a headed-span-based method that decomposes the score of a dependency tree into scores of headed spans. They show improvement over first-order graph-based methods. However, their method does not score dependency arcs at all, and dependency arcs are implicitly induced by their cubic-time algorithm, which is possibly sub-optimal since modeling dependency arcs is intuitively useful. In this work, we aim to combine …
Dependency parses are an effective way to inject linguistic knowledge into many downstream tasks, and many practitioners wish to efficiently parse sentences at scale. Recent advances in GPU hardware have enabled neural networks to achieve significant gains over the previous best models, these models still fail to leverage GPUs' capability for massive parallelism due to their requirement of sequential processing of the sentence. In response, we propose Dilated Iterated Graph Convolutional Neural Networks (DIG-CNNs) for graph-based dependency parsing, a graph convolutional architecture that allo…
Institut für Maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung（机器语言处理研究所）；Universität Stuttgart（斯图加特大学）
We present a transition-based dependency parser that uses a convolutional neural network to compose word representations from characters. The character composition model shows great improvement over the word-lookup model, especially for parsing agglutinative languages. These improvements are even better than using pre-trained word embeddings from extra data. On the SPMRL data sets, our system outperforms the previous best greedy parser (Ballesteros et al., 2015) by a margin of 3% on average.
Most syntactic dependency parsing models may fall into one of two categories: transition- and graph-based models. The former models enjoy high inference efficiency with linear time complexity, but they rely on the stacking or re-ranking of partially-built parse trees to build a complete parse tree and are stuck with slower training for the necessity of dynamic oracle training. The latter, graph-based models, may boast better performance but are unfortunately marred by polynomial time inference. In this paper, we propose a novel parsing order objective, resulting in a novel dependency parsing m…
Easy-first parsing relies on subtree re-ranking to build the complete parse tree. Whereas the intermediate state of parsing processing is represented by various subtrees, whose internal structural information is the key lead for later parsing action decisions, we explore a better representation for such subtrees. In detail, this work introduces a bottom-up subtree encoding method based on the child-sum tree-LSTM. Starting from an easy-first dependency parser without other handcraft features, we show that the effective subtree encoder does promote the parsing process, and can make a greedy sear…
Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）
We propose a novel dependency-based hybrid tree model for semantic parsing, which converts natural language utterance into machine interpretable meaning representations. Unlike previous state-of-the-art models, the semantic information is interpreted as the latent dependency between the natural language words in our joint representation. Such dependency information can capture the interactions between the semantics and natural language words. We integrate a neural component into our model and propose an efficient dynamic-programming algorithm to perform tractable inference. Through extensive e…
Universidade da Coruña（拉科鲁尼亚大学）；Cornell University（康奈尔大学）
Shi, Huang, and Lee (2017) obtained state-of-the-art results for English and Chinese dependency parsing by combining dynamic-programming implementations of transition-based dependency parsers with a minimal set of bidirectional LSTM features. However, their results were limited to projective parsing. In this paper, we extend their approach to support non-projectivity by providing the first practical implementation of the MH_4 algorithm, an $O(n^4)$ mildly nonprojective dynamic-programming parser with very high coverage on non-projective treebanks. To make MH_4 compatible with minimal transitio…
We provide a study of using the biaffine model for neural discourse dependency parsing and achieve significant performance improvement compared with the baseline parsers. We compare the Eisner algorithm and the Chu-Liu-Edmonds algorithm in the task and find that using the Chu-Liu-Edmonds algorithm generates deeper trees and achieves better performance. We also evaluate the structure of the output of the parser with average maximum path length and average proportion of leaf nodes and find that the dependency trees generated by the parser are close to the gold trees. As the corpus allows non-pro…
Head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG) enjoys a uniform formalism representing rich contextual syntactic and even semantic meanings. This paper makes the first attempt to formulate a simplified HPSG by integrating constituent and dependency formal representations into head-driven phrase structure. Then two parsing algorithms are respectively proposed for two converted tree representations, division span and joint span. As HPSG encodes both constituent and dependency structure information, the proposed HPSG parsers may be regarded as a sort of joint decoder for both types of structures and…
University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago（芝加哥丰田技术研究所）
We develop novel first- and second-order features for dependency parsing based on the Google Syntactic Ngrams corpus, a collection of subtree counts of parsed sentences from scanned books. We also extend previous work on surface $n$-gram features from Web1T to the Google Books corpus and from first-order to second-order, comparing and analysing performance over newswire and web treebanks. Surface and syntactic $n$-grams both produce substantial and complementary gains in parsing accuracy across domains. Our best system combines the two feature sets, achieving up to 0.8% absolute UAS improvemen…
We present a dependency parser implemented as a single deep neural network that reads orthographic representations of words and directly generates dependencies and their labels. Unlike typical approaches to parsing, the model doesn't require part-of-speech (POS) tagging of the sentences. With proper regularization and additional supervision achieved with multitask learning we reach state-of-the-art performance on Slavic languages from the Universal Dependencies treebank: with no linguistic features other than characters, our parser is as accurate as a transition- based system trained on perfec…
In Semantic Dependency Parsing (SDP), semantic relations form directed acyclic graphs, rather than trees. We propose a new iterative predicate selection (IPS) algorithm for SDP. Our IPS algorithm combines the graph-based and transition-based parsing approaches in order to handle multiple semantic head words. We train the IPS model using a combination of multi-task learning and task-specific policy gradient training. Trained this way, IPS achieves a new state of the art on the SemEval 2015 Task 18 datasets. Furthermore, we observe that policy gradient training learns an easy-first strategy.
Transition-based dependency parsers often need sequences of local shift and reduce operations to produce certain attachments. Correct individual decisions hence require global information about the sentence context and mistakes cause error propagation. This paper proposes a novel transition system, arc-swift, that enables direct attachments between tokens farther apart with a single transition. This allows the parser to leverage lexical information more directly in transition decisions. Hence, arc-swift can achieve significantly better performance with a very small beam size. Our parsers reduc…
Unsupervised dependency parsing aims to learn a dependency parser from unannotated sentences. Existing work focuses on either learning generative models using the expectation-maximization algorithm and its variants, or learning discriminative models using the discriminative clustering algorithm. In this paper, we propose a new learning strategy that learns a generative model and a discriminative model jointly based on the dual decomposition method. Our method is simple and general, yet effective to capture the advantages of both models and improve their learning results. We tested our method o…
We suggest a compositional vector representation of parse trees that relies on a recursive combination of recurrent-neural network encoders. To demonstrate its effectiveness, we use the representation as the backbone of a greedy, bottom-up dependency parser, achieving state-of-the-art accuracies for English and Chinese, without relying on external word embeddings. The parser's implementation is available for download at the first author's webpage.
We present a semantic parser for Abstract Meaning Representations which learns to parse strings into tree representations of the compositional structure of an AMR graph. This allows us to use standard neural techniques for supertagging and dependency tree parsing, constrained by a linguistically principled type system. We present two approximative decoding algorithms, which achieve state-of-the-art accuracy and outperform strong baselines.
We present a simple and effective scheme for dependency parsing which is based on bidirectional-LSTMs (BiLSTMs). Each sentence token is associated with a BiLSTM vector representing the token in its sentential context, and feature vectors are constructed by concatenating a few BiLSTM vectors. The BiLSTM is trained jointly with the parser objective, resulting in very effective feature extractors for parsing. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach by applying it to a greedy transition-based parser as well as to a globally optimized graph-based parser. The resulting parsers have very sim…
IIT Kanpur（印度理工学院坎普尔分校）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；University of Utah（犹他大学）；Tata Consultancy Services（塔塔咨询服务公司）；IIT Kharagpur（印度理工学院卡拉格普尔分校）
Neural dependency parsing has achieved remarkable performance for many domains and languages. The bottleneck of massive labeled data limits the effectiveness of these approaches for low resource languages. In this work, we focus on dependency parsing for morphological rich languages (MRLs) in a low-resource setting. Although morphological information is essential for the dependency parsing task, the morphological disambiguation and lack of powerful analyzers pose challenges to get this information for MRLs. To address these challenges, we propose simple auxiliary tasks for pretraining. We perf…
Aix Marseille Univ（艾克斯-马赛大学）；Université de Toulon（土伦大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；LIS（计算机科学实验室）
Greedy algorithms for NLP such as transition based parsing are prone to error propagation. One way to overcome this problem is to allow the algorithm to backtrack and explore an alternative solution in cases where new evidence contradicts the solution explored so far. In order to implement such a behavior, we use reinforcement learning and let the algorithm backtrack in cases where such an action gets a better reward than continuing to explore the current solution. We test this idea on both POS tagging and dependency parsing and show that backtracking is an effective means to fight against err…
Extracting temporal relations between events and time expressions has many applications such as constructing event timelines and time-related question answering. It is a challenging problem which requires syntactic and semantic information at sentence or discourse levels, which may be captured by deep contextualized language models (LMs) such as BERT (Devlin et al., 2019). In this paper, we develop several variants of BERT-based temporal dependency parser, and show that BERT significantly improves temporal dependency parsing (Zhang and Xue, 2018a). We also present a detailed analysis on why de…
We present the Uppsala system for the CoNLL 2018 Shared Task on universal dependency parsing. Our system is a pipeline consisting of three components: the first performs joint word and sentence segmentation; the second predicts part-of- speech tags and morphological features; the third predicts dependency trees from words and tags. Instead of training a single parsing model for each treebank, we trained models with multiple treebanks for one language or closely related languages, greatly reducing the number of models. On the official test run, we ranked 7th of 27 teams for the LAS and MLAS met…
University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学）；Uppsala University（乌普萨拉大学）；KU Leuven（鲁汶大学）；National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）
Large multilingual pretrained language models such as mBERT and XLM-RoBERTa have been found to be surprisingly effective for cross-lingual transfer of syntactic parsing models (Wu and Dredze 2019), but only between related languages. However, source and training languages are rarely related, when parsing truly low-resource languages. To close this gap, we adopt a method from multi-task learning, which relies on automated curriculum learning, to dynamically optimize for parsing performance on outlier languages. We show that this approach is significantly better than uniform and size-proportiona…
University of Stuttgart（斯图加特大学）；Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence（博世人工智能中心）
Modern graph-based syntactic dependency parsers operate by predicting, for each token within a sentence, a probability distribution over its possible syntactic heads (i.e., all other tokens) and then extracting a maximum spanning tree from the resulting log-probabilities. Nowadays, virtually all such parsers utilize deep neural networks and may thus be susceptible to miscalibration (in particular, overconfident predictions). In this paper, we prove that temperature scaling, a popular technique for post-hoc calibration of neural networks, cannot change the output of the aforementioned procedure…
University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
We present a deep neural architecture that parses sentences into three semantic dependency graph formalisms. By using efficient, nearly arc-factored inference and a bidirectional-LSTM composed with a multi-layer perceptron, our base system is able to significantly improve the state of the art for semantic dependency parsing, without using hand-engineered features or syntax. We then explore two multitask learning approaches---one that shares parameters across formalisms, and one that uses higher-order structures to predict the graphs jointly. We find that both approaches improve performance acr…
