Target Language-Aware Constrained Inference for Cross-lingual Dependency Parsing
This addresses the challenge of parsing dependencies across languages for NLP applications, but it is incremental as it builds on existing methods by incorporating linguistic constraints.
The paper tackled the problem of cross-lingual dependency parsing by leveraging weak linguistic supervision for target languages, resulting in improved performance on 15 to 17 out of 19 languages, with significant gains for languages with different word orders from the source.
Prior work on cross-lingual dependency parsing often focuses on capturing the commonalities between source and target languages and overlooks the potential of leveraging linguistic properties of the languages to facilitate the transfer. In this paper, we show that weak supervisions of linguistic knowledge for the target languages can improve a cross-lingual graph-based dependency parser substantially. Specifically, we explore several types of corpus linguistic statistics and compile them into corpus-wise constraints to guide the inference process during the test time. We adapt two techniques, Lagrangian relaxation and posterior regularization, to conduct inference with corpus-statistics constraints. Experiments show that the Lagrangian relaxation and posterior regularization inference improve the performances on 15 and 17 out of 19 target languages, respectively. The improvements are especially significant for target languages that have different word order features from the source language.