Syntax in End-to-End Natural Language Processing (2021)

Abstract: This tutorial surveys the latest technical progress of syntactic parsing and the role of syntax in end-to-end natural language processing (NLP) tasks, in which semantic role labeling (SRL) and machine translation (MT) are the representative NLP tasks that have always been beneficial from informative syntactic clues since a long time ago, though the advance from end-to-end deep learning models shows new results. In this tutorial, we will first introduce the background and the latest progress of syntactic parsing and SRL/NMT. Then, we will summarize the key evidence about the syntactic impacts over these two concerning tasks, and explore the behind reasons from both computational and linguistic backgrounds.

## relevance to the computational linguistics community the topics included in this tutorial, i.e., syntax parsing, srl, and mt, are all the classic ones to the entire nlp/cl community. this tutorial is primarily towards researchers who have a basic understanding of deep learning based nlp. we believe that this tutorial would help the audience more deeply understand the relationship between three classic nlp tasks, i.e., syntax parsing and srl/mt. presenter: hai zhao presenter: rui wang and kehai chen 1. syntactic parsing (50 min) 3. syntax in mt (40 min) 4. summary (20 min) 1.1 traditional syntactic parsing 3.1 basics of mt 4.1 conclusion 1.2 neural syntactic parsing 3.2 syntax in rnn-based mt 4.2 future trends 1.3 basic of end-to-end nlp 3.3 syntax in self-attention based mt 2. syntax in srl (40 min) 4.linguistic in mt (30 min) 2.1 basic of srl 4.1 linguistic cognition for mt 2.2 linguistic, syntax, and semantics 4.2 linguistic prior knowledge for mt 2.3 syntax in end-to-end base srl coffee break (30 min) ## tutorial outlines we will present our tutorial in three hours. the detailed tutorial outlines are shown in ## previous venues and approximate audience sizes there are some tutorials focusing on single nlp tasks, such as nmt in acl-2016/ijcnlp-2018, semantic parsing in acl-2018. in particular, the nmt tutorial at acl-2016 (with around 800 registrations) had attracted around 150 attendees and the one at ijcnlp-2017 (with around 300 registrations) had attracted around 40 attendees. our tutorial will become the first one that explores the relationship between syntactic impact and end-to-end nlp tasks. as our topic is rather broader, we hope that this tutorial will attract around 100-200 attendees.