Typology-aware neural dependency parsing : challenges and directions

Abstract

This thesis explores the task of leveraging typology in the context of cross-lingual dependency parsing. While this linguistic information has shown great promise in pre-neural parsing, results for neural architectures have been mixed. The aim of the investigation put forth in this thesis is to better understand this state-of-the-art. Our main findings are as follows: 1) The benefit of typological information is derived from coarsely grouping languages into syntactically-homogeneous clusters rather than from learning to leverage variations along individual typological dimensions in a compositional manner; 2) Typology consistent with the actual corpus statistics yields better transfer performance; 3) Typological similarity is only a rough proxy of cross-lingual transferability with respect to parsing. Code for the work in this thesis is available at https://github.com/ajfisch/TypologyParser.