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arXiv · 2005.03436

Fine-Grained Analysis of Cross-Linguistic Syntactic Divergences

Dmitry Nikolaev·Ofir Arviv·Taelin Karidi·Neta Kenneth·Veronika Mitnik·Lilja Maria Saeboe·Omri Abend
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Abstract

The patterns in which the syntax of different languages converges and diverges are often used to inform work on cross-lingual transfer. Nevertheless, little empirical work has been done on quantifying the prevalence of different syntactic divergences across language pairs. We propose a framework for extracting divergence patterns for any language pair from a parallel corpus, building on Universal Dependencies. We show that our framework provides a detailed picture of cross-language divergences, generalizes previous approaches, and lends itself to full automation. We further present a novel dataset, a manually word-aligned subset of the Parallel UD corpus in five languages, and use it to perform a detailed corpus study. We demonstrate the usefulness of the resulting analysis by showing that it can help account for performance patterns of a cross-lingual parser.

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Dmitry Nikolaev, Ofir Arviv, Taelin Karidi, Neta Kenneth, Veronika Mitnik, Lilja Maria Saeboe, Omri Abend. 2020-05-07. Fine-Grained Analysis of Cross-Linguistic Syntactic Divergences. https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.03436

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