103 research outputs found
Viability of Sequence Labeling Encodings for Dependency Parsing
Programa Oficial de Doutoramento en Computación . 5009V01[Abstract]
This thesis presents new methods for recasting dependency parsing as
a sequence labeling task yielding a viable alternative to the traditional
transition- and graph-based approaches. It is shown that sequence labeling
parsers provide several advantages for dependency parsing, such
as: (i) a good trade-off between accuracy and parsing speed, (ii) genericity
which enables running a parser in generic sequence labeling software
and (iii) pluggability which allows using full parse trees as features to
downstream tasks.
The backbone of dependency parsing as sequence labeling are the encodings
which serve as linearization methods for mapping dependency
trees into discrete labels, such that each token in a sentence is associated
with a label. We introduce three encoding families comprising: (i)
head selection, (ii) bracketing-based and (iii) transition-based encodings
which are differentiated by the way they represent a dependency
tree as a sequence of labels. We empirically examine the viability of
the encodings and provide an analysis of their facets.
Furthermore, we explore the feasibility of leveraging external complementary
data in order to enhance parsing performance. Our sequence
labeling parser is endowed with two kinds of representations. First,
we exploit the complementary nature of dependency and constituency
parsing paradigms and enrich the parser with representations from both
syntactic abstractions. Secondly, we use human language processing
data to guide our parser with representations from eye movements.
Overall, the results show that recasting dependency parsing as sequence
labeling is a viable approach that is fast and accurate and provides
a practical alternative for integrating syntax in NLP tasks.[Resumen]
Esta tesis presenta nuevos métodos para reformular el análisis sintáctico
de dependencias como una tarea de etiquetado secuencial, lo
que supone una alternativa viable a los enfoques tradicionales basados
en transiciones y grafos. Se demuestra que los analizadores de etiquetado
secuencial ofrecen varias ventajas para el análisis sintáctico de
dependencias, como por ejemplo (i) un buen equilibrio entre la precisión
y la velocidad de análisis, (ii) la genericidad que permite ejecutar
un analizador en un software genérico de etiquetado secuencial y (iii)
la conectividad que permite utilizar el árbol de análisis completo como
características para las tareas posteriores.
El pilar del análisis sintáctico de dependencias como etiquetado secuencial
son las codificaciones que sirven como métodos de linealización
para transformar los árboles de dependencias en etiquetas discretas, de
forma que cada token de una frase se asocia con una etiqueta. Introducimos
tres familias de codificación que comprenden: (i) selección de
núcleos, (ii) codificaciones basadas en corchetes y (iii) codificaciones basadas
en transiciones que se diferencian por la forma en que representan
un árbol de dependencias como una secuencia de etiquetas. Examinamos
empíricamente la viabilidad de las codificaciones y ofrecemos un
análisis de sus facetas.
Además, exploramos la viabilidad de aprovechar datos complementarios
externos para mejorar el rendimiento del análisis sintáctico. Dotamos
a nuestro analizador sintáctico de dos tipos de representaciones. En
primer lugar, explotamos la naturaleza complementaria de los paradigmas
de análisis sintáctico de dependencias y constituyentes, enriqueciendo
el analizador sintáctico con representaciones de ambas abstracciones
sintácticas. En segundo lugar, utilizamos datos de procesamiento del
lenguaje humano para guiar nuestro analizador con representaciones de
los movimientos oculares.
En general, los resultados muestran que la reformulación del análisis
sintáctico de dependencias como etiquetado de secuencias es un enfoque
viable, rápido y preciso, y ofrece una alternativa práctica para integrar
la sintaxis en las tareas de PLN.[Resumo]
Esta tese presenta novos métodos para reformular a análise sintáctica
de dependencias como unha tarefa de etiquetaxe secuencial, o que
supón unha alternativa viable aos enfoques tradicionais baseados en
transicións e grafos. Demóstrase que os analizadores de etiquetaxe secuencial
ofrecen varias vantaxes para a análise sintáctica de dependencias,
por exemplo (i) un bo equilibrio entre a precisión e a velocidade
de análise, (ii) a xenericidade que permite executar un analizador nun
software xenérico de etiquetaxe secuencial e (iii) a conectividade que
permite empregar a árbore de análise completa como características
para as tarefas posteriores.
O piar da análise sintáctica de dependencias como etiquetaxe secuencial
son as codificacións que serven como métodos de linealización para
transformar as árbores de dependencias en etiquetas discretas, de forma
que cada token dunha frase se asocia cunha etiqueta. Introducimos
tres familias de codificación que comprenden: (i) selección de núcleos,
(ii) codificacións baseadas en corchetes e (iii) codificacións baseadas en
transicións que se diferencian pola forma en que representan unha árbore
de dependencia como unha secuencia de etiquetas. Examinamos
empíricamente a viabilidade das codificacións e ofrecemos unha análise
das súas facetas.
Ademais, exploramos a viabilidade de aproveitar datos complementarios
externos para mellorar o rendemento da análise sintáctica. O noso
analizador sintáctico de etiquetaxe secuencial está dotado de dous tipos
de representacións. En primeiro lugar, explotamos a natureza complementaria
dos paradigmas de análise sintáctica de dependencias e constituíntes
e enriquecemos o analizador sintáctico con representacións de
ambas abstraccións sintácticas. En segundo lugar, empregamos datos
de procesamento da linguaxe humana para guiar o noso analizador con
representacións dos movementos oculares.
En xeral, os resultados mostran que a reformulación da análise sintáctico
de dependencias como etiquetaxe de secuencias é un enfoque
viable, rápido e preciso, e ofrece unha alternativa práctica para integrar
a sintaxe nas tarefas de PLN.This work has been carried out thanks to the funding from
the European Research Council (ERC), under the European Union’s
Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (FASTPARSE, grant
agreement No 714150)
Statistical Parsing by Machine Learning from a Classical Arabic Treebank
Research into statistical parsing for English has enjoyed over a decade of successful results. However, adapting these models to other languages has met with difficulties. Previous comparative work has shown that Modern Arabic is one of the most difficult languages to parse due to rich morphology and free word order. Classical Arabic is the ancient form of Arabic, and is understudied in computational linguistics, relative to its worldwide reach as the language of the Quran. The thesis is based on seven publications that make significant contributions to knowledge relating to annotating and parsing Classical Arabic.
Classical Arabic has been studied in depth by grammarians for over a thousand years using a traditional grammar known as i’rāb (إعغاة ). Using this grammar to develop a representation for parsing is challenging, as it describes syntax using a hybrid of phrase-structure and dependency relations. This work aims to advance the state-of-the-art for hybrid parsing by introducing a formal representation for annotation and a resource for machine learning. The main contributions are the first treebank for Classical Arabic and the first statistical dependency-based parser in any language for ellipsis, dropped pronouns and hybrid representations.
A central argument of this thesis is that using a hybrid representation closely aligned to traditional grammar leads to improved parsing for Arabic. To test this hypothesis, two approaches are compared. As a reference, a pure dependency parser is adapted using graph transformations, resulting in an 87.47% F1-score. This is compared to an integrated parsing model with an F1-score of 89.03%, demonstrating that joint dependency-constituency parsing is better suited to Classical Arabic.
The Quran was chosen for annotation as a large body of work exists providing detailed syntactic analysis. Volunteer crowdsourcing is used for annotation in combination with expert supervision. A practical result of the annotation effort is the corpus website: http://corpus.quran.com, an educational resource with over two million users per year
Applying Occam's Razor to Transformer-Based Dependency Parsing: What Works, What Doesn't, and What is Really Necessary
The introduction of pre-trained transformer-based contextualized word
embeddings has led to considerable improvements in the accuracy of graph-based
parsers for frameworks such as Universal Dependencies (UD). However, previous
works differ in various dimensions, including their choice of pre-trained
language models and whether they use LSTM layers. With the aims of
disentangling the effects of these choices and identifying a simple yet widely
applicable architecture, we introduce STEPS, a new modular graph-based
dependency parser. Using STEPS, we perform a series of analyses on the UD
corpora of a diverse set of languages. We find that the choice of pre-trained
embeddings has by far the greatest impact on parser performance and identify
XLM-R as a robust choice across the languages in our study. Adding LSTM layers
provides no benefits when using transformer-based embeddings. A multi-task
training setup outputting additional UD features may contort results. Taking
these insights together, we propose a simple but widely applicable parser
architecture and configuration, achieving new state-of-the-art results (in
terms of LAS) for 10 out of 12 diverse languages.Comment: 14 pages, 1 figure; camera-ready version for IWPT 202
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
Cross-lingual alignments of ELMo contextual embeddings
Building machine learning prediction models for a specific NLP task requires
sufficient training data, which can be difficult to obtain for less-resourced
languages. Cross-lingual embeddings map word embeddings from a less-resourced
language to a resource-rich language so that a prediction model trained on data
from the resource-rich language can also be used in the less-resourced
language. To produce cross-lingual mappings of recent contextual embeddings,
anchor points between the embedding spaces have to be words in the same
context. We address this issue with a novel method for creating cross-lingual
contextual alignment datasets. Based on that, we propose several cross-lingual
mapping methods for ELMo embeddings. The proposed linear mapping methods use
existing Vecmap and MUSE alignments on contextual ELMo embeddings. Novel
nonlinear ELMoGAN mapping methods are based on GANs and do not assume
isomorphic embedding spaces. We evaluate the proposed mapping methods on nine
languages, using four downstream tasks: named entity recognition (NER),
dependency parsing (DP), terminology alignment, and sentiment analysis. The
ELMoGAN methods perform very well on the NER and terminology alignment tasks,
with a lower cross-lingual loss for NER compared to the direct training on some
languages. In DP and sentiment analysis, linear contextual alignment variants
are more successful.Comment: 30 pages, 5 figure
Representation and parsing of multiword expressions
This book consists of contributions related to the definition, representation and parsing of MWEs. These reflect current trends in the representation and processing of MWEs. They cover various categories of MWEs such as verbal, adverbial and nominal MWEs, various linguistic frameworks (e.g. tree-based and unification-based grammars), various languages including English, French, Modern Greek, Hebrew, Norwegian), and various applications (namely MWE detection, parsing, automatic translation) using both symbolic and statistical approaches
Recommended from our members
Cross-Lingual Transfer of Natural Language Processing Systems
Accurate natural language processing systems rely heavily on annotated datasets. In the absence of such datasets, transfer methods can help to develop a model by transferring annotations from one or more rich-resource languages to the target language of interest. These methods are generally divided into two approaches: 1) annotation projection from translation data, aka parallel data, using supervised models in rich-resource languages, and 2) direct model transfer from annotated datasets in rich-resource languages.
In this thesis, we demonstrate different methods for transfer of dependency parsers and sentiment analysis systems. We propose an annotation projection method that performs well in the scenarios for which a large amount of in-domain parallel data is available. We also propose a method which is a combination of annotation projection and direct transfer that can leverage a minimal amount of information from a small out-of-domain parallel dataset to develop highly accurate transfer models. Furthermore, we propose an unsupervised syntactic reordering model to improve the accuracy of dependency parser transfer for non-European languages. Finally, we conduct a diverse set of experiments for the transfer of sentiment analysis systems in different data settings.
A summary of our contributions are as follows:
* We develop accurate dependency parsers using parallel text in an annotation projection framework. We make use of the fact that the density of word alignments is a valuable indicator of reliability in annotation projection.
* We develop accurate dependency parsers in the absence of a large amount of parallel data. We use the Bible data, which is in orders of magnitude smaller than a conventional parallel dataset, to provide minimal cues for creating cross-lingual word representations. Our model is also capable of boosting the performance of annotation projection with a large amount of parallel data. Our model develops cross-lingual word representations for going beyond the traditional delexicalized direct transfer methods. Moreover, we propose a simple but effective word translation approach that brings in explicit lexical features from the target language in our direct transfer method.
* We develop different syntactic reordering models that can change the source treebanks in rich-resource languages, thus preventing learning a wrong model for a non-related language. Our experimental results show substantial improvements over non-European languages.
* We develop transfer methods for sentiment analysis in different data availability scenarios. We show that we can leverage cross-lingual word embeddings to create accurate sentiment analysis systems in the absence of annotated data in the target language of interest.
We believe that the novelties that we introduce in this thesis indicate the usefulness of transfer methods. This is appealing in practice, especially since we suggest eliminating the requirement for annotating new datasets for low-resource languages which is expensive, if not impossible, to obtain
Current trends
Deep parsing is the fundamental process aiming at the representation of the syntactic
structure of phrases and sentences. In the traditional methodology this process is
based on lexicons and grammars representing roughly properties of words and interactions
of words and structures in sentences. Several linguistic frameworks, such as Headdriven
Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG), Tree Adjoining
Grammar (TAG), Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG), etc., offer different
structures and combining operations for building grammar rules. These already contain
mechanisms for expressing properties of Multiword Expressions (MWE), which, however,
need improvement in how they account for idiosyncrasies of MWEs on the one
hand and their similarities to regular structures on the other hand. This collaborative
book constitutes a survey on various attempts at representing and parsing MWEs in the
context of linguistic theories and applications
Unsupervised grammar induction with Combinatory Categorial Grammars
Language is a highly structured medium for communication. An idea starts in the speaker's mind (semantics) and is transformed into a well formed, intelligible, sentence via the specific syntactic rules of a language. We aim to discover the fingerprints of this process in the choice and location of words used in the final utterance. What is unclear is how much of this latent process can be discovered from the linguistic signal alone and how much requires shared non-linguistic context, knowledge, or cues.
Unsupervised grammar induction is the task of analyzing strings in a language to discover the latent syntactic structure of the language without access to labeled training data. Successes in unsupervised grammar induction shed light on the amount of syntactic structure that is discoverable from raw or part-of-speech tagged text. In this thesis, we present a state-of-the-art grammar induction system based on Combinatory Categorial Grammars. Our choice of syntactic formalism enables the first labeled evaluation of an unsupervised system. This allows us to perform an in-depth analysis of the system’s linguistic strengths and weaknesses. In order to completely eliminate reliance on any supervised systems, we also examine how performance is affected when we use induced word clusters instead of gold-standard POS tags. Finally, we perform a semantic evaluation of induced grammars, providing unique insights into future directions for unsupervised grammar induction systems
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