Reconstructing Native Language Typology from Foreign Language Usage

Linguists and psychologists have long been studying cross-linguistic transfer, the influence of native language properties on linguistic performance in a foreign language. In this work we provide empirical evidence for this process in the form of a strong correlation between language similarities derived from structural features in English as Second Language (ESL) texts and equivalent similarities obtained from the typological features of the native languages. We leverage this finding to recover native language typological similarity structure directly from ESL text, and perform prediction of typological features in an unsupervised fashion with respect to the target languages. Our method achieves 72.2% accuracy on the typology prediction task, a result that is highly competitive with equivalent methods that rely on typological resources.Comment: CoNLL 201

Working Hard or Hardly Working: Challenges of Integrating Typology into Neural Dependency Parsers

This paper explores the task of leveraging typology in the context of cross-lingual dependency parsing. While this linguistic information has shown great promise in pre-neural parsing, results for neural architectures have been mixed. The aim of our investigation is to better understand this state-of-the-art. Our main findings are as follows: 1) The benefit of typological information is derived from coarsely grouping languages into syntactically-homogeneous clusters rather than from learning to leverage variations along individual typological dimensions in a compositional manner; 2) Typology consistent with the actual corpus statistics yields better transfer performance; 3) Typological similarity is only a rough proxy of cross-lingual transferability with respect to parsing.Comment: EMNLP 201

Ambiguity-aware ensemble training for semi-supervised dependency parsing

Abstract This paper proposes a simple yet effective framework for semi-supervised dependency parsing at entire tree level, referred to as ambiguity-aware ensemble training. Instead of only using 1-best parse trees in previous work, our core idea is to utilize parse forest (ambiguous labelings) to combine multiple 1-best parse trees generated from diverse parsers on unlabeled data. With a conditional random field based probabilistic dependency parser, our training objective is to maximize mixed likelihood of labeled data and auto-parsed unlabeled data with ambiguous labelings. This framework offers two promising advantages. 1) ambiguity encoded in parse forests compromises noise in 1-best parse trees. During training, the parser is aware of these ambiguous structures, and has the flexibility to distribute probability mass to its preferred parse trees as long as the likelihood improves. 2) diverse syntactic structures produced by different parsers can be naturally compiled into forest, offering complementary strength to our single-view parser. Experimental results on benchmark data show that our method significantly outperforms the baseline supervised parser and other entire-tree based semi-supervised methods, such as self-training, co-training and tri-training