Multitask Learning for Cross-Lingual Transfer of Broad-coverage Semantic Dependencies

We describe a method for developing broad-coverage semantic dependency parsers for languages for which no semantically annotated resource is available. We leverage a multitask learning framework coupled with annotation projection. We use syntactic parsing as the auxiliary task in our multitask setup. Our annotation projection experiments from English to Czech show that our multitask setup yields 3.1% (4.2%) improvement in labeled F1-score on in-domain (out-of-domain) test set compared to a single-task baseline.