Phylogenetic Grammar Induction

Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick, Dan Klein

Abstract: We present an approach to multilingual grammar induction that exploits a phylogeny-structured model of parameter drift. Our method does not require any translated texts or token-level alignments. Instead, the phylogenetic prior couples languages at a parameter level. Joint induction in the multilingual model substantially outperforms independent learning, with larger gains both from more articulated phylogenies and as well as from increasing numbers of languages. Across eight languages, the multilingual approach gives error reductions over the standard monolingual DMV averaging 21.1% and reaching as high as 39%.