A Second Wave of UD Hebrew Treebanking and Cross-Domain Parsing
This provides updated resources for Hebrew NLP, enabling better processing of modern web text, though it is incremental in method.
The authors created a new Universal Dependencies treebank for contemporary Hebrew from Wikipedia to address the outdated Hebrew Treebank, achieving new state-of-the-art results on UD NLP tasks with transformer-based methods.
Foundational Hebrew NLP tasks such as segmentation, tagging and parsing, have relied to date on various versions of the Hebrew Treebank (HTB, Sima'an et al. 2001). However, the data in HTB, a single-source newswire corpus, is now over 30 years old, and does not cover many aspects of contemporary Hebrew on the web. This paper presents a new, freely available UD treebank of Hebrew stratified from a range of topics selected from Hebrew Wikipedia. In addition to introducing the corpus and evaluating the quality of its annotations, we deploy automatic validation tools based on grew (Guillaume, 2021), and conduct the first cross domain parsing experiments in Hebrew. We obtain new state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on UD NLP tasks, using a combination of the latest language modelling and some incremental improvements to existing transformer based approaches. We also release a new version of the UD HTB matching annotation scheme updates from our new corpus.