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%. 1

We describe a novel approach for inducing unsupervised part-of-speech taggers for languages that have no labeled training data, but have translated text in a resource-rich language. Our method does not assume any knowledge about the target language (in particular no tagging dictionary is assumed), making it applicable to a wide array of resource-poor languages. We use graph-based label propagation for cross-lingual knowledge transfer and use the projected labels as features in an unsupervised model (Berg-Kirkpatrick et al., 2010). Across eight European languages, our approach results in an average absolute improvement of 10.4 % over a state-of-the-art baseline, and 16.7 % over vanilla hidden Markov models induced with the Expectation Maximization algorithm. 1

We describe a method for prediction of linguistic structure in a language for which only unlabeled data is available, using annotated data from a set of one or more helper languages. Our approach is based on a model that locally mixes between supervised models from the helper languages. Parallel data is not used, allowing the technique to be applied even in domains where human-translated texts are unavailable. We obtain state-of-theart performance for two tasks of structure prediction: unsupervised part-of-speech tagging and unsupervised dependency parsing. 1

Dependency parsing is a central NLP task. In this paper we show that the common evaluation for unsupervised dependency parsing is highly sensitive to problematic annotations. We show that for three leading unsupervised parsers (Klein and Manning, 2004; Cohen and Smith, 2009; Spitkovsky et al., 2010a), a small set of parameters can be found whose modification yields a significant improvement in standard evaluation measures. These parameters correspond to local cases where no linguistic consensus exists as to the proper gold annotation. Therefore, the standard evaluation does not provide a true indication of algorithm quality. We present a new measure, Neutral Edge Direction (NED), and show that it greatly reduces this undesired phenomenon. 1

Part-of-speech (POS) induction is one of the most popular tasks in research on unsupervised NLP. Many different methods have been proposed, yet comparisons are difficult to make since there is little consensus on evaluation framework, and many papers evaluate against only one or two competitor systems. Here we evaluate seven different POS induction systems spanning nearly 20 years of work, using a variety of measures. We show that some of the oldest (and simplest) systems stand up surprisingly well against more recent approaches. Since most of these systems were developed and tested using data from the WSJ corpus, we compare their generalization abilities by testing on both WSJ and the multilingual Multext-East corpus. Finally, we introduce the idea of evaluating systems based on their ability to produce cluster prototypes that are useful as input to a prototype-driven learner. In most cases, the prototype-driven learner outperforms the unsupervised system used to initialize it, yielding state-of-the-art results on WSJ and improvements on non-English corpora. 1

We show how punctuation can be used to improve unsupervised dependency parsing. Our linguistic analysis confirms the strong connection between English punctuation and phrase boundaries in the Penn Treebank. However, approaches that naively include punctuation marks in the grammar (as if they were words) do not perform well with Klein and Manning’s Dependency Model with Valence (DMV). Instead, we split a sentence at punctuation and impose parsing restrictions over its fragments. Our grammar inducer is trained on the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) and achieves 59.5 % accuracy out-of-domain (Brown sentences with 100 or fewer words), more than 6 % higher than the previous best results. Further evaluation, using the 2006/7 CoNLL sets, reveals that punctuation aids grammar induction in 17 of 18 languages, for an overall average net gain of 1.3%. Some of this improvement is from training, but more than half is from parsing with induced constraints, in inference. Punctuation-aware decoding works with existing (even already-trained) parsing models and always increased accuracy in our experiments. 1

Probabilistic grammars offer great flexibility in modeling discrete sequential data like natural language text. Their symbolic component is amenable to inspection by humans, while their probabilistic component helps resolve ambiguity. They also permit the use of well-understood, generalpurpose learning algorithms. There has been an increased interest in using probabilistic grammars in the Bayesian setting. To date, most of the literature has focused on using a Dirichlet prior. The Dirichlet prior has several limitations, including that it cannot directly model covariance between the probabilistic grammar’s parameters. Yet, various grammar parameters are expected to be correlated because the elements in language they represent share linguistic properties. In this paper, we suggest an alternative to the Dirichlet prior, a family of logistic normal distributions. We derive an inference algorithm for this family of distributions and experiment with the task of dependency grammar induction, demonstrating performance improvements with our priors on a set of six treebanks in different natural languages. Our covariance framework permits soft parameter tying within grammars and across grammars for text in different languages, and we show empirical gains in a novel learning setting using bilingual, non-parallel data.

We introduce a discriminatively trained, globally normalized, log-linear variant of the lexical translation models proposed by Brown et al. (1993). In our model, arbitrary, nonindependent features may be freely incorporated, thereby overcoming the inherent limitation of generative models, which require that features be sensitive to the conditional independencies of the generative process. However, unlike previous work on discriminative modeling of word alignment (which also permits the use of arbitrary features), the parameters in our models are learned from unannotated parallel sentences, rather than from supervised word alignments. Using a variety of intrinsic and extrinsic measures, including translation performance, we show our model yields better alignments than generative baselines in a number of language pairs. 1

We examine models for unsupervised learning with concave log-likelihood functions. We begin with the most well-known example, IBM Model 1 for word alignment (Brown et al., 1993), and study its properties, discussing why other models for unsupervised learning are so seldom concave. We then present concave models for dependency grammar induction and validate them experimentally. Despite their simplicity, we find that initializing the dependency model with valence using our concave models can approach state of the art grammar induction results for English and Chinese. 1

We consider a new subproblem of unsupervised parsing from raw text, unsupervised partial parsing—the unsupervised version of text chunking. We show that addressing this task directly, using probabilistic finite-state methods, produces better results than relying on the local predictions of a current best unsupervised parser, Seginer’s (2007) CCL. These finite-state models are combined in a cascade to produce more general (full-sentence) constituent structures; doing so outperforms CCL by a wide margin in unlabeled PARSEVAL scores for English, German and Chinese. Finally, we address the use of phrasal punctuation