On the Relation between Syntactic Divergence and Zero-Shot Performance
Ofir Arviv, Dmitry Nikolaev, Taelin Karidi, Omri Abend

TL;DR
This paper investigates how the preservation of syntactic relations in translation affects zero-shot dependency parsing performance across languages, highlighting the importance of cross-lingual stability.
Contribution
It introduces a detailed analysis of individual syntactic edges' preservation and proposes linguistically motivated transformations to improve cross-lingual parsing stability.
Findings
Strong correlation between syntactic stability and zero-shot parsing accuracy.
Transformations to Universal Dependencies enhance cross-lingual transfer.
Cross-lingual stability impacts downstream relation extraction performance.
Abstract
We explore the link between the extent to which syntactic relations are preserved in translation and the ease of correctly constructing a parse tree in a zero-shot setting. While previous work suggests such a relation, it tends to focus on the macro level and not on the level of individual edges-a gap we aim to address. As a test case, we take the transfer of Universal Dependencies (UD) parsing from English to a diverse set of languages and conduct two sets of experiments. In one, we analyze zero-shot performance based on the extent to which English source edges are preserved in translation. In another, we apply three linguistically motivated transformations to UD, creating more cross-lingually stable versions of it, and assess their zero-shot parsability. In order to compare parsing performance across different schemes, we perform extrinsic evaluation on the downstream task of…
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Taxonomy
TopicsNatural Language Processing Techniques · Topic Modeling · Text Readability and Simplification
MethodsTest
