# Dynamic Syntax Mapping: A New Approach to Unsupervised Syntax Parsing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.14966 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14966/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [BERT Rediscovers the Classical NLP Pipeline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05950/) (2019)
- [What Does BERT Look At? An Analysis of BERT's Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04341/) (2019)
- [Probing Classifiers: Promises, Shortcomings, and Advances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12452/) (2021)
- [Stanza: A Python Natural Language Processing Toolkit for Many Human Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07082/) (2020)
- [Universal Dependencies v2: An Evergrowing Multilingual Treebank Collection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10643/) (2020)
- [Targeted Syntactic Evaluation of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09031/) (2018)
- [Colorless green recurrent networks dream hierarchically](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.11138/) (2018)
- [Assessing BERT's Syntactic Abilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05287/) (2019)
- [Perturbed Masking: Parameter-free Probing for Analyzing and Interpreting BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14786/) (2020)
- [Do Attention Heads in BERT Track Syntactic Dependencies?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12246/) (2019)
- [Compound Probabilistic Context-Free Grammars for Grammar Induction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.10225/) (2019)
- [Are Pre-trained Language Models Aware of Phrases? Simple but Strong Baselines for Grammar Induction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.00737/) (2020)
- [LasUIE: Unifying Information Extraction with Latent Adaptive Structure-aware Generative Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06248/) (2023)
- [Learn from Syntax: Improving Pair-wise Aspect and Opinion Terms Extractionwith Rich Syntactic Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02520/) (2021)
- [Do Neural Language Models Show Preferences for Syntactic Formalisms?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14096/) (2020)
- [Scene Graph as Pivoting: Inference-time Image-free Unsupervised Multimodal Machine Translation with Visual Scene Hallucination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12256/) (2023)
- [Mastering the Explicit Opinion-role Interaction: Syntax-aided Neural Transition System for Unified Opinion Role Labeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02001/) (2021)
- [Retrofitting Structure-aware Transformer Language Model for End Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07408/) (2020)
- [When classifying grammatical role, BERT doesn't care about word order... except when it matters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06204/) (2022)
- [Effective Token Graph Modeling using a Novel Labeling Strategy for Structured Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10796/) (2022)
- [On the Inductive Bias of Masked Language Modeling: From Statistical to Syntactic Dependencies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05694/) (2021)
- [Entity-centered Cross-document Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.16541/) (2022)
- [Universal Dependencies according to BERT: both more specific and more general](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14620/) (2020)
- [Cross-lingual Semantic Role Labeling with Model Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.10284/) (2020)
- [Linguistic Dependencies and Statistical Dependence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08685/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The intricate hierarchical structure of syntax is fundamental to the intricate and systematic nature of human language. This study investigates the premise that language models, specifically their attention distributions, can encapsulate syntactic dependencies. We introduce Dynamic Syntax Mapping (DSM), an innovative approach for the agnostic induction of these structures. Our method diverges from traditional syntax models which rely on predefined annotation schemata. Instead, we focus on a core characteristic inherent in dependency relations: syntactic substitutability. This concept refers to the interchangeability of words within the same syntactic category at either end of a dependency. By leveraging this property, we generate a collection of syntactically invariant sentences, which serve as the foundation for our parsing framework. Our findings reveal that the use of an increasing array of substitutions notably enhances parsing precision on natural language data. Specifically, in the context of long-distance subject-verb agreement, DSM exhibits a remarkable advancement over prior methodologies. Furthermore, DSM's adaptability is demonstrated through its successful application in varied parsing scenarios, underscoring its broad applicability.