Adventures in Multilingual Parsing

The typological diversity of the world’s languages poses important challenges for the techniques used in machine translation, syntactic parsing and other areas of natural language processing. Statistical models developed and tuned for English do not necessarily perform well for richly inflected languages, where larger morphological paradigms and more flexible word order gives rise to data sparseness. Since paradigms can easily be captured in rule-based descriptions, this suggests that hybrid approaches combining statistical modeling with linguistic descriptions might be more effective. However, in order to gain more insight into the benefits of different techniques from a typological perspective, we also need linguistic resources that are comparable across languages, something that is currently lacking to a large extent. In this talk, I will report on two ongoing projects that tackle these issues in different ways. In the first part, I will describe techniques for joint morphological and syntactic parsing that combines statistical dependency parsing and rule-based morphological analysis, specifically targeting the challenges posed by richly inflected languages. In the second part, I will present the Universal Dependency Treebank Project, a recent initiative seeking to create multilingual corpora with morphosyntactic annotation that is consistent across languages.