PPT: Parsimonious Parser Transfer for Unsupervised Cross-Lingual Adaptation

Kemal Kurniawan, Lea Frermann, Philip Schulz, Trevor Cohn

Syntax: Tagging, Chunking, and Parsing Long paper Paper

Gather-2C: Apr 22, Gather-2C: Apr 22 (13:00-15:00 UTC) [Join Gather Meeting]

You can open the pre-recorded video in separate windows.

Abstract: Cross-lingual transfer is a leading technique for parsing low-resource languages in the absence of explicit supervision. Simple `direct transfer' of a learned model based on a multilingual input encoding has provided a strong benchmark. This paper presents a method for unsupervised cross-lingual transfer that improves over direct transfer systems by using their output as implicit supervision as part of self-training on unlabelled text in the target language. The method assumes minimal resources and provides maximal flexibility by (a) accepting any pre-trained arc-factored dependency parser; (b) assuming no access to source language data; (c) supporting both projective and non-projective parsing; and (d) supporting multi-source transfer. With English as the source language, we show significant improvements over state-of-the-art transfer models on both distant and nearby languages, despite our conceptually simpler approach. We provide analyses of the choice of source languages for multi-source transfer, and the advantage of non-projective parsing. Our code is available online.
NOTE: Video may display a random order of authors. Correct author list is at the top of this page.

Connected Papers in EACL2021

Similar Papers

Beyond the English Web: Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual and Lightweight Monolingual Classification of Registers
Liina Repo, Valtteri Skantsi, Samuel Rönnqvist, Saara Hellström, Miika Oinonen, Anna Salmela, Douglas Biber, Jesse Egbert, Sampo Pyysalo, Veronika Laippala,
Multilingual and cross-lingual document classification: A meta-learning approach
Niels van der Heijden, Helen Yannakoudakis, Pushkar Mishra, Ekaterina Shutova,
Multilingual Machine Translation: Closing the Gap between Shared and Language-specific Encoder-Decoders
Carlos Escolano, Marta R. Costa-jussà, José A. R. Fonollosa, Mikel Artetxe,