Universal Dependencies are hard to parse – or are they?
- Universal Dependency (UD) annotations, despite their usefulness for cross-lingual tasks and semantic applications, are not optimised for statistical parsing. In the paper, we ask what exactly causes the decrease in parsing accuracy when training a parser on UD-style annotations and whether the effect is similarly strong for all languages. We conduct a series of experiments where we systematically modify individual annotation decisions taken in the UD scheme and show that this results in an increased accuracy for most, but not for all languages. We show that the encoding in the UD scheme, in particular the decision to encode content words as heads, causes an increase in dependency length for nearly all treebanks and an increase in arc direction entropy for many languages, and evaluate the effect this has on parsing accuracy.
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| Author: | Ines Rehbein, Julius Steen, Bich-Ngoc Do, Anette Frank |
|---|---|
| URN: | urn:nbn:de:bsz:mh39-80232 |
| URL: | http://aclweb.org/anthology/W17-6525 |
| ISBN: | 978-91-7685-467-9 |
| Parent Title (English): | Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Dependency Linguistics (Depling 2017). September 18-20, 2017 Università di Pisa Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale “A. Zampolli”, CNR Pisa |
| Series (Serial Number): | Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings (139) |
| Publisher: | Linköping University Electronic Press |
| Place of publication: | Linköping, Schweden |
| Editor: | Simonetta Montemagni, Joakim Nivre |
| Document Type: | Conference Proceeding |
| Language: | English |
| Year of first Publication: | 2017 |
| Date of Publication (online): | 2018/10/02 |
| Publicationstate: | Veröffentlichungsversion |
| Reviewstate: | Peer-Review |
| GND Keyword: | Annotation; Parser; Syntax; Universalgrammatik |
| First Page: | 218 |
| Last Page: | 228 |
| DDC classes: | 400 Sprache / 400 Sprache, Linguistik |
| Open Access?: | ja |
| Leibniz-Classification: | Sprache, Linguistik |
| Linguistics-Classification: | Computerlinguistik |
| Program areas: | Digitale Sprachwissenschaft |
| Licence (English): |  Creative Commons - Attribution 4.0 International |