Parsing Italian texts together is better than parsing them alone!

In this paper we present a work aimed at testing the most advanced, state-of-the-art syntactic parsers based on deep neural networks (DNN) on Italian. We made a set of experiments by using the Universal Dependencies benchmarks and propose a new solution based on ensemble systems obtaining very good performances.In questo contributo presentia-mo alcuni esperimenti volti a verificare le prestazioni dei più avanzati parser sintattici sull’italiano utilizzando i treebank disponibili nell’ambito delle Universal Dependencies. Proponiamo inoltre un nuovo sistema basato sull’ ensemble par-sing che ha mostrato ottime prestazioni

State-of-the-art Italian dependency parsers based on neural and ensemble systems

In this paper we present a work which aims to test the most advanced, state-of-the-art syntactic dependency parsers based on deep neural networks (DNN) on Italian. We made a large set of experiments by using two Italian treebanks containing different text types downloaded from the Universal Dependencies project and propose a new solution based on ensemble systems. We implemented the proposed ensemble solutions by testing different techniques described in literature, obtaining very good parsing results, well above the state of the art for Italian

Promocijas darbs

Elektroniskā versija nesatur pielikumusPromocijas darbs veltīts hibrīda latviešu valodas gramatikas modeļa izstrādei un transformēšanai uz Universālo atkarību (Universal Dependencies, UD) modeli. Promocijas darbā ir aizsākts jauns latviešu valodas izpētes virziens – sintaktiski marķētos tekstos balstīti pētījumi. Darba rezultātā ir izstrādāts un aprobēts fundamentāls, latviešu valodai iepriekš nebijis valodas resurss – mašīnlasāms sintaktiski marķēts korpuss 17 tūkstošu teikumu apmērā. Teikumi ir marķēti atbilstoši diviem dažādiem sintaktiskās marķēšanas modeļiem – darbā radītajam frāžu struktūru un atkarību gramatikas hibrīdam un starptautiski aprobētajam UD modelim. Izveidotais valodas resurss publiski pieejams gan lejuplādei, gan tiešsaistes meklēšanai abos iepriekš minētajos marķējuma veidos. Pētījuma laikā radīta rīku kopa un latviešu valodas sintaktiski marķētā korpusa veidošanai vajadzīgā infrastruktūra. Tajā skaitā tika definēti plašam valodas pārklājumam nepieciešamie LU MII eksperimentālā hibrīdā gramatikas modeļa paplašinājumi. Tāpat tika analizētas iespējas atbilstoši hibrīdmodelim marķētus datus pārveidot uz atkarību modeli, un tika radīts atvasināts UD korpuss. Izveidotais sintaktiski marķētais korpuss ir kalpojis par pamatu, lai varētu radīt augstas precizitātes (91%) parsētājus latviešu valodai. Savukārt dalība UD iniciatīvā ir veicinājusi latviešu valodas un arī citu fleksīvu valodu resursu starptautisko atpazīstamību un fleksīvām valodām piemērotāku rīku izveidi datorlingvistikā – pētniecības jomā, kuras vēsturiskā izcelsme pamatā meklējama darbā ar analītiskajām valodām. Atslēgvārdi: sintakses korpuss, Universal Dependencies, valodu tehnoloģijasThe given doctoral thesis describes the creation of a hybrid grammar model for the Latvian language, as well as its subsequent conversion to a Universal Dependencies (UD) grammar model. The thesis also lays the groundwork for Latvian language research through syntactically annotated texts. In this work, a fundamental Latvian language resource was developed and evaluated for the first time – a machine-readable treebank of 17 thousand syntactically annotated sentences. The sentences are annotated according to two syntactic annotation models: the hybrid grammar model developed in the thesis, and the internationally recognised UD model. Both annotated versions of the treebank are publicly available for downloading or querying online. Over the course of the study, a set of tools and infrastructure necessary for treebank creation and maintenance were developed. The language coverage of the IMCS UL experimental hybrid model was extended, and the possibilities were defined for converting data annotated according to the hybrid grammar model to the dependency grammar model. Based on this work, a derived UD treebank was created. The resulting treebank has served as a basis for the development of high accuracy (91%) Latvian language parsers. Furthermore, the participation in the UD initiative has promoted the international recognition of Latvian and other inflective languages and the development of better-fitted tools for inflective language processing in computational linguistics, which historically has been more oriented towards analytic languages. Keywords: treebank, Universal Dependencies, language technologie

Supervised Training on Synthetic Languages: A Novel Framework for Unsupervised Parsing

This thesis focuses on unsupervised dependency parsing—parsing sentences of a language into dependency trees without accessing the training data of that language. Different from most prior work that uses unsupervised learning to estimate the parsing parameters, we estimate the parameters by supervised training on synthetic languages. Our parsing framework has three major components: Synthetic language generation gives a rich set of training languages by mix-and-match over the real languages; surface-form feature extraction maps an unparsed corpus of a language into a fixed-length vector as the syntactic signature of that language; and, finally, language-agnostic parsing incorporates the syntactic signature during parsing so that the decision on each word token is reliant upon the general syntax of the target language. The fundamental question we are trying to answer is whether some useful information about the syntax of a language could be inferred from its surface-form evidence (unparsed corpus). This is the same question that has been implicitly asked by previous papers on unsupervised parsing, which only assumes an unparsed corpus to be available for the target language. We show that, indeed, useful features of the target language can be extracted automatically from an unparsed corpus, which consists only of gold part-of-speech (POS) sequences. Providing these features to our neural parser enables it to parse sequences like those in the corpus. Strikingly, our system has no supervision in the target language. Rather, it is a multilingual system that is trained end-to-end on a variety of other languages, so it learns a feature extractor that works well. This thesis contains several large-scale experiments requiring hundreds of thousands of CPU-hours. To our knowledge, this is the largest study of unsupervised parsing yet attempted. We show experimentally across multiple languages: (1) Features computed from the unparsed corpus improve parsing accuracy. (2) Including thousands of synthetic languages in the training yields further improvement. (3) Despite being computed from unparsed corpora, our learned task-specific features beat previous works’ interpretable typological features that require parsed corpora or expert categorization of the language

Proceedings of the Fifth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics CLiC-it 2018

On behalf of the Program Committee, a very warm welcome to the Fifth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-­‐it 2018). This edition of the conference is held in Torino. The conference is locally organised by the University of Torino and hosted into its prestigious main lecture hall “Cavallerizza Reale”. The CLiC-­‐it conference series is an initiative of the Italian Association for Computational Linguistics (AILC) which, after five years of activity, has clearly established itself as the premier national forum for research and development in the fields of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing, where leading researchers and practitioners from academia and industry meet to share their research results, experiences, and challenges