A Framework for Understanding the Role of Morphology in Universal Dependency Parsing

Mathieu Dehouck, Pascal Denis

Abstract:

This paper presents a simple framework for
characterizing morphological complexity and
how it encodes syntactic information. In particular,
we propose a new measure of morphosyntactic
complexity in terms of governordependent
preferential attachment that explains
parsing performance. Through experiments
on dependency parsing with data
from Universal Dependencies (UD), we show
that representations derived from morphological
attributes deliver important parsing performance
improvements over standard word
form embeddings when trained on the same
datasets. We also show that the new morphosyntactic
complexity measure is predictive of
the gains provided by using morphological attributes
over plain forms on parsing scores,
making it a tool to distinguish languages using
morphology as a syntactic marker from others.