Cross-lingual CCG Induction

Kilian Evang

Abstract: Combinatory categorial grammars are linguistically motivated and useful for semantic parsing, but costly to acquire in a supervised way and difficult to acquire in an unsupervised way. We propose an alternative making use of cross-lingual learning: an existing source-language parser is used together with a parallel corpus to induce a grammar and parsing model for a target language. On the PASCAL benchmark, cross-lingual CCG induction outperforms CCG induction from gold-standard POS tags on 3 out of 8 languages, and unsupervised CCG induction on 6 out of 8 languages. We also show that cross-lingually induced CCGs reflect syntactic properties of the target languages.