Syntactic Analysis - project
For 5LN713 you have do a project, equaivalent to 2.5 hp, or approximately 1.7 weeks of full time work.
The project can be done either individually or in pairs. If you wish to do the projects in pairs, it is your responsibility to find someone to work with. The scope of a pair project has to be larger than for an individual project, but I don't expect it to be double the size, since you both need to be involved in all parts of the project.
The project has to be related to parsing, but you can choose the topic quite freely. You may work either on phrase structure parsing or dependency parsing. The ogal of the project is to be able to design, evaluate, and/or analyse syntactic parsers. It should thus contain a practical component, such as implementing an algorithm or evaluating and analsying the performance of existing parsers.
Here are some tentative ideas for the project:
- Cross-lingual dependency parsing with UUparser and UD treebanks. UUparser can be used for cross-lingual parsing, where you include data fram other languages to improve parsing, often for low-resource languages. To get started you can read the description here: Cross-lingual dependency parsing, based on an earlier assignment, where you can see how you can run UUparser on our Linux system, and get some inspiration. It is recommended that you run few-shot experiments rather than zero-shot. If you do this you need to first decide which target language(s) to focus on, then come up with an hypothesis, design some experiments, and run the evaluation. In addition, we would expect you to have a description in your report of how UUparser works on a high level.
- Implement a parser/parser component. A useful option is to implement Earley's algorithm. If you do that, it is usually a good scope to implement it as a recognizer, and then discuss how it can potentially be extended to a probabilistic parser in a report. You also need to read up more about Earley's algorithm. It is also possible to come up with another plan for implementing a parser or parser component.
- Evaluation project. Evaluate one or more parsers. Here you have to decide which language(s) you are interested in, which parser(s) you want to evaluate, what type of text domain(s), and what type of evaluation you will perform.
- Treebank transformations. Investigate the effect of different types of treebank transformations on parsing. This article can be a good starting point if you are interested in phrase structure parsing: Mark Johnson. PCFG Models of Linguistic Tree Representations. Computational Linguistics 24(4). Pages 613-632. If you're interested in dependency parsing, here is an article which could provide some inspiration: Miryam de Lhoneux, Joakim Nivre, 2016, Should Have, Would Have, Could Have. Investigating Verb Group Representations for Parsing with Universal Dependencies.
- Feature engineering for dependency parsing. Investigate the effect of different types of features and transition systems used for learning the best transitions in an "old school" dependency parser, for example MaltParser.
- Your own proposal
Project proposal and groups
Before starting the project you need to decide if you are working alone, or find a peer to work with in a pair. Sign up for a group in Studium, either individually or in pairs. This is needed in order to hand in your proposal and report. Please do not sign up with another student unless you have already decided that you want to work together.
You will first write a project proposal of around 1/2 A4-page, where you describe what you intend to do in your project. The deadline for the project proposal is February 27.
Reporting
The project should be reported in a final report (pdf) describing what you have done in your project and relating it to the parsing literature. If your project included implementation you should also hand in your code. If you have more than one code file, please zip them. Depending on the specific project the length and content of the report will vary.
You should also discuss your work at a seminar on March 22. No formal presentation with slides is required, but be prepared to describe what you have done in your project in smaller groups. If you work in a pair you will be expected to individually be able to discuss your project, and you and your peer will be assigned to different small groups.
Deadlines
- Project proposal: February 27
- Sminar with discussion/informal presentations of the projects: March 22
- Written project report: March 24
If you have any questions about the project proposal, please contact Sara.