{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/on-the-relation-between-syntactic-divergence","title":"On the Relation between Syntactic Divergence and Zero-Shot Performance","arxiv_id":"2110.04644","date":"2021-10-09","proceeding":"EMNLP 2021 11","authors":["Ofir Arviv","Dmitry Nikolaev","Taelin Karidi","Omri Abend"],"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 cross-lingual relation extraction (RE) using a subset of a popular English RE benchmark translated to Russian and Korean. In both sets of experiments, our results suggest a strong relation between cross-lingual stability and zero-shot parsing performance.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.04644v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2110.04644v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"on-the-relation-between-syntactic-divergence","repo_url":"https://github.com/ofirarviv/improving-ud","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"cross-lingual-zero-shot-dependency-parsing","task_name":"Cross-lingual zero-shot dependency parsing"},{"task_slug":"dependency-parsing","task_name":"Dependency Parsing"},{"task_slug":null,"task_name":"Relation"},{"task_slug":"relation-classification","task_name":"Relation Classification"},{"task_slug":"relation-extraction","task_name":"Relation Extraction"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"test","method_name":"Test"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2110.04644","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}