Investigation of Transfer Languages for Parsing Latin: Italic Branch vs. Hellenic Branch

Antonia Karamolegkou, Sara Stymne


Abstract
Choosing a transfer language is a crucial step in transfer learning. In much previous research on dependency parsing, related languages have successfully been used. However, when parsing Latin, it has been suggested that languages such as ancient Greek could be helpful. In this work we parse Latin in a low-resource scenario, with the main goal to investigate if Greek languages are more helpful for parsing Latin than related Italic languages, and show that this is indeed the case. We further investigate the influence of other factors including training set size and content as well as linguistic distances. We find that one explanatory factor seems to be the syntactic similarity between Latin and Ancient Greek. The influence of genres or shared annotation projects seems to have a smaller impact.
Anthology ID:
2021.nodalida-main.32
Volume:
Proceedings of the 23rd Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics (NoDaLiDa)
Month:
May 31--2 June
Year:
2021
Address:
Reykjavik, Iceland (Online)
Editors:
Simon Dobnik, Lilja Øvrelid
Venue:
NoDaLiDa
SIG:
Publisher:
Linköping University Electronic Press, Sweden
Note:
Pages:
315–320
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.nodalida-main.32
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Antonia Karamolegkou and Sara Stymne. 2021. Investigation of Transfer Languages for Parsing Latin: Italic Branch vs. Hellenic Branch. In Proceedings of the 23rd Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics (NoDaLiDa), pages 315–320, Reykjavik, Iceland (Online). Linköping University Electronic Press, Sweden.
Cite (Informal):
Investigation of Transfer Languages for Parsing Latin: Italic Branch vs. Hellenic Branch (Karamolegkou & Stymne, NoDaLiDa 2021)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.nodalida-main.32.pdf