Isomorphic Transfer of Syntactic Structures in Cross-Lingual NLP

Edoardo Maria Ponti, Roi Reichart, Anna Korhonen, Ivan Vulić


Abstract
The transfer or share of knowledge between languages is a potential solution to resource scarcity in NLP. However, the effectiveness of cross-lingual transfer can be challenged by variation in syntactic structures. Frameworks such as Universal Dependencies (UD) are designed to be cross-lingually consistent, but even in carefully designed resources trees representing equivalent sentences may not always overlap. In this paper, we measure cross-lingual syntactic variation, or anisomorphism, in the UD treebank collection, considering both morphological and structural properties. We show that reducing the level of anisomorphism yields consistent gains in cross-lingual transfer tasks. We introduce a source language selection procedure that facilitates effective cross-lingual parser transfer, and propose a typologically driven method for syntactic tree processing which reduces anisomorphism. Our results show the effectiveness of this method for both machine translation and cross-lingual sentence similarity, demonstrating the importance of syntactic structure compatibility for boosting cross-lingual transfer in NLP.
Anthology ID:
P18-1142
Volume:
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2018
Address:
Melbourne, Australia
Editors:
Iryna Gurevych, Yusuke Miyao
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1531–1542
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P18-1142
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P18-1142
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Edoardo Maria Ponti, Roi Reichart, Anna Korhonen, and Ivan Vulić. 2018. Isomorphic Transfer of Syntactic Structures in Cross-Lingual NLP. In Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1531–1542, Melbourne, Australia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Isomorphic Transfer of Syntactic Structures in Cross-Lingual NLP (Ponti et al., ACL 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P18-1142.pdf
Note:
 P18-1142.Notes.pdf
Poster:
 P18-1142.Poster.pdf
Data
Universal Dependencies