Twitter Universal Dependency Parsing for African-American and Mainstream American English

Due to the presence of both Twitter-specific conventions and non-standard and dialectal language, Twitter presents a significant parsing challenge to current dependency parsing tools. We broaden English dependency parsing to handle social media English, particularly social media African-American English (AAE), by developing and annotating a new dataset of 500 tweets, 250 of which are in AAE, within the Universal Dependencies 2.0 framework. We describe our standards for handling Twitter- and AAE-specific features and evaluate a variety of cross-domain strategies for improving parsing with no, or very little, in-domain labeled data, including a new data synthesis approach. We analyze these methods{'} impact on performance disparities between AAE and Mainstream American English tweets, and assess parsing accuracy for specific AAE lexical and syntactic features. Our annotated data and a parsing model are available at: \url{http://slanglab.cs.umass.edu/TwitterAAE/}.