The SLT-Interactions Parsing System at the CoNLL 2018 Shared Task

This paper describes our system (SLT-Interactions) for the CoNLL 2018 shared task: Multilingual Parsing from Raw Text to Universal Dependencies. Our system performs three main tasks: word segmentation (only for few treebanks), POS tagging and parsing. While segmentation is learned separately, we use neural stacking for joint learning of POS tagging and parsing tasks. For all the tasks, we employ simple neural network architectures that rely on long short-term memory (LSTM) networks for learning task-dependent features. At the basis of our parser, we use an arc-standard algorithm with Swap action for general non-projective parsing. Additionally, we use neural stacking as a knowledge transfer mechanism for cross-domain parsing of low resource domains. Our system shows substantial gains against the UDPipe baseline, with an average improvement of 4.18% in LAS across all languages. Overall, we are placed at the 12th position on the official test sets.