Coordinate Structures in Universal Dependencies for Head-Final
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Coordinate Structures in Universal Dependencies for Head-final Languages Hiroshi Kanayama Na-Rae Han IBM Research University of Pittsburgh Tokyo, Japan Pittsburgh, PA [email protected] [email protected] Masayuki Asahara Jena D. Hwang Yusuke Miyao NINJAL, Japan IHMC University of Tokyo Tokyo, Japan Ocala, FL Tokyo, Japan [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Jinho Choi Yuji Matsumoto Emory University Nara Institute of Science and Technology Atlanta, GA Nara, Japan [email protected] [email protected] Abstract tic, both within and across languages, is advan- tageous. However, as discussed in several pro- This paper discusses the representation of co- posal for extended representation of coordination ordinate structures in the Universal Dependen- structures (Gerdes and Kahane, 2015; Schuster and cies framework for two head-final languages, Japanese and Korean. UD applies a strict prin- Manning, 2016), they cannot be straightforwardly ciple that makes the head of coordination the represented as dependencies. Especially in head- left-most conjunct. However, the guideline final languages such as Japanese and Korean, the may produce syntactic trees which are diffi- left-headed structure poses some fundamental is- cult to accept in head-final languages. This pa- sues due to hypotactic attributes in terms of syntax per describes the status in the current Japanese in coordinate structures. and Korean corpora and proposes alternative This paper points out the issues in the treatment designs suitable for these languages. of coordinate structures with evidence of linguistic 1 Introduction plausibility and the trainability of parsers, reports on the current status of the corpora in those lan- The Universal Dependencies (UD) (Nivre et al., guages, and proposes alternative representations. 2016, 2017) is a worldwide project to provide mul- Section 2 describes the linguistic features of tilingual syntactic resources of dependency struc- head-final languages, and Section 3 points out the tures with a uniformed tag set for all languages. problems in the left-headed coordinate structures The dependency structure in UD was originally de- in head-final languages. Section 4 summarizes the signed based on the Universal Stanford Dependen- current status of UD Japanese (Tanaka et al., 2016; cies (De Marneffe et al., 2014), in which the left- Asahara et al., 2018) and UD Korean (Chun et al., most conjunct was selected as the head node in co- 2018) corpora released as version 2.2. Section 5 ordinate structures. After some modifications, the shows the experimental results on multiple cor- current UD (version 2) uses the definition as shown pora in Japanese and Korean to attest the difficulty in Figure 1. in training with left-headed coordination. Section The UD principles include a simple mandate: 6 proposes a revision to the UD guidelines more the left word is always the head in parallel and suited to head-final languages. sequential structures, including coordination, ap- position and multi-word expressions. The ratio- 2 Head-final languages nale behind this uniformity is that these structures do not involve true dependency, and having a sin- Both Japanese and Korean are strictly head-final gle direction for conj relations on the assumption agglutinative languages in which most dependen- that coordinate structures are completely paratac- cies between content words have the head in the obj root conj conj cc nsubj cc det det John bought and ate an apple and a banana PROPN VERB CCONJ VERB DET NOUN CCONJ DET NOUN Figure 1: English coordinate structures (“bought and ate” and “an apple and a banana”) in UD v2. obj root nsubj acl obl punct case aux case case aux 妻 が 買っ た かばん を 友達 に ⾒せ たい 。 tsuma -ga kat -ta kaban -wo tomodachi -ni mise -tai . NOUN ADP VERB AUX NOUN ADP NOUN ADP VERB AUX PUNCT ‘wife’ -NOM ‘buy’ -PAST ‘bag’ -ACC ‘friend’ -DAT ‘show’ ‘want’ . Figure 2: A head-final dependency structure of a Japanese sentence “妻が買ったかばんを友達に⾒せたい” (‘(I) want to show the bag which (my) wife bought to (my) friend’). root obj punct nsubj acl obl flat 아내가 산 가방을 친구에게 보이고 싶다 . anay+ka sa+n kapang+ul chinku+eykey poi+ko siph+ta . NOUN VERB NOUN NOUN VERB VERB PUNCT ‘wife-NOM’ ‘buy-PAST’ ‘bag-ACC’ ‘friend-DAT’ ‘show’ ‘want’ . Figure 3: A head-final dependency structure of a Korean sentence “아내가 산 가방을 친구에게 보이고 싶다.”, which is parallel to that in Figure 2. right. Figures 2 and 3 depict the dependency struc- shows a Korean counterpart to Figure 2, where the tures in Universal Dependencies for Japanese and syntax and the main dependency relations mirror Korean sentences, respectively. Both have right- those of the Japanese example. The main departure headed dependencies except for functional words here is that the Korean UD’s treatment of postpo- and punctuations. sition suffixes and verbal endings are dependent Japanese has a well-known phrasal unit, called morphemes in the eojeol-based Korean orthogra- bunsetsu—each unit is marked with a rounded phy, and thus, are neither tokenized nor assigned rectangle in Figure 2.A bunsetsu consists of a separate dependency relations. content word (or multiple words in the case of UD corpora from both languages are converted a compound) and zero or more functional words from dependency or constituency corpora based on such as postpositional case markers (ADP), parti- bunsetsu or eojeol units. In Japanese, functional cles (PART) and auxiliary verbs (AUX). words in each bunsetsu (ADP, AUX and PUNCT Korean has a similar unit called eojeol. It typ- in Figure 2) must depend on the head word in the ically consists of a content word optionally fol- bunsetsu (NOUN and VERB). In the Korean ex- lowed by highly productive verbal or nominal ample of Figure 3, the last verb “싶다” (‘want’) suffixation, and, unlike Japanese bunsetsu, it is behaves as a function word though it is tagged as marked by white space in orthography. Figure 3 VERB, thus it is attached to the main verb with flat label. As for the dependencies between con- 3.1 Nominal coordination tent words, the right-hand unit is always the head. If a Japanese noun phrase “⽝と猫” (‘dog and cat’) The exceptions are limited to special cases such as is regarded as a coordination and represented in a annotations using parentheses, but when the UD’s left-headed manner under UD, the structure is as left-headedness principle is adopted, multi-word Figure 4 in a sentence “⽝と猫が⾛る” (‘A cute expressions and coordination are added to excep- dog and cat run’). When the particle “と”(to) is tional cases. regarded as a conjunction CCONJ to connect two In addition to these two languages, Tamil is cat- conjuncts, instead of a case marker attached to the egorized as a rigid head-final language (Polinsky, preceding noun “⽝” (‘dog’), it is made a depen- 2012). According to the typological classification dent of the right conjunct, breaking the bunsetsu using statistics of UD corpora (Chen and Gerdes, unit in the dependency structure. 2017), Japanese and Korean fall into a similar class Also the nominative case marker “が”(ga) fol- in terms of distance of dependencies. The same lowing “猫” (‘cat’) should specify the nominative goes for Urdu and Hindi, but they have more flex- case of the noun phrase (‘dog and cat’), then the ibility in word order including predicates. case marker is a child of “⽝” (‘dog’) as the left conjunct, which produces a long distance depen- nsubj dency for a case marker which is usually attached root case to the preceding word. conj The Korean counterpart in Figure 5 mirrors the acl cc Japanese example, except that again due to the dif- ferent tokenization scheme the conjunctive particle かわいい ⽝ と 猫 が ⾛る “와”(wa) is kept suffixized in the left nominal con- kawaii inu -to neko -ga hashiru junct eojeol, thus the conjunction relation cc is not ADJ NOUN CCONJ NOUN ADP VERB overtly marked. ‘cute’ ‘dog’ ‘and’ ‘cat’ -NOM ‘run’ A common problem with adjectival modifica- tion in UD shown in Figures 4 and 5 is that there Figure 4: Left-headed representation of a nominal co- is no way to distinguish between modification ordination in Japanese “⽝と猫” (‘dog and cat’), in a sentence “かわいい⽝と猫が⾛る” (‘A cute dog and of the full coordination vs. of the first conjunct cat run’). (Przepiórkowski and Patejuk, 2018) . For exam- root ple, there is no way to specify the scope of the ad- jective ‘cute’: the two readings (1) only a dog is nsubj cute and (2) both animals are cute. acl conj 3.2 Verbal coordination 예쁜 개와 고양이가 달린다 yeyppun kay+wa koyangi+ka tali+nta Further critical issues are attested in the verbal co- ADJ NOUN NOUN VERB ordinate structures. Figure 6 shows the left-headed ‘cute’ ‘dog+and’ ‘cat-NOM’ ‘run’ verbal coordination “⾷べて⾛る” (‘eat and run’) in a noun phrase “⾷べて⾛る⼈” (‘a person who Figure 5: Left-headed representation of a nominal co- eats and runs’), where verb “⾷べ” (‘eat’) is the ordination in Korean “개와 고양이‘’ (’dog and cat’), in child of “⼈” (‘person’). Despite this dependency a sentence “예쁜 개와 고양이가 달린다” (‘A cute dog and cat run’). relationship, morphological markings tells us a dif- ferent story: “⾷べ+て” is an adverbial form that modifies another verb, i.e.,“⾛る” (‘run’), and the verb “⾛る” (‘run’) is an adnominal form that mod- ifies another noun, i.e.,“⼈” (‘person’). Therefore, 3 Issues with left-headed coordination the dependency between ‘eat’ and ‘person’ does not properly reflect the syntactic relationship of the This section points out several issues regarding modification of a verb by an adnominal verb, with- Japanese and Korean coordinate structures in Uni- out seeing the whole coordinate structure ‘eat and versal Dependencies when the left-headed rules run’.