Multilingual Dependency Parsing of Uralic Languages : Parsing with zero-shot transfer and cross-lingual models using geographically proximate, genealogically related, and syntactically similar transfer languages

One way to improve dependency parsing scores for low-resource languages is to make use of existing resources from other closely related or otherwise similar languages. In this paper, we look at eleven Uralic target languages (Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian, Karelian, Livvi, Komi Zyrian, Komi Permyak, Moksha, Erzya, North Sámi, and Skolt Sámi) with treebanks of varying sizes and select transfer languages based on geographical, genealogical, and syntactic distances. We focus primarily on the performance of parser models trained on various combinations of geographically proximate and genealogically related transfer languages, in target-trained, zero-shot, and cross-lingual configurations. We find that models trained on combinations of geographically proximate and genealogically related transfer languages reach the highest LAS in most zero-shot models, while our highest-performing cross-lingual models were trained on genealogically related languages. We also find that cross-lingual models outperform zero-shot transfer models. We then select syntactically similar transfer languages for three target languages, and find a slight improvement in the case of Hungarian. We discuss the results and conclude with suggestions for possible future work

PARSEME corpora annotated for verbal multiword expressions (version 1.3)

This multilingual resource contains corpora in which verbal MWEs have been manually annotated. VMWEs include idioms (let the cat out of the bag), light-verb constructions (make a decision), verb-particle constructions (give up), inherently reflexive verbs (help oneself), and multi-verb constructions (make do). This is the first release of the corpora without an associated shared task. Previous version (1.2) was associated with the PARSEME Shared Task on semi-supervised Identification of Verbal MWEs (2020). The data covers 26 languages corresponding to the combination of the corpora for all previous three editions (1.0, 1.1 and 1.2) of the corpora. VMWEs were annotated according to the universal guidelines. The corpora are provided in the cupt format, inspired by the CONLL-U format. Morphological and syntactic information, ­­­­including parts of speech, lemmas, morphological features and/or syntactic dependencies, are also provided. Depending on the language, the information comes from treebanks (e.g., Universal Dependencies) or from automatic parsers trained on treebanks (e.g., UDPipe). All corpora are split into training, development and test data, following the splitting strategy adopted for the PARSEME Shared Task 1.2. The annotation guidelines are available online: https://parsemefr.lis-lab.fr/parseme-st-guidelines/1.3 The .cupt format is detailed here: https://multiword.sourceforge.net/cupt-format