POS-Signature Demonstration Retrieval for In-Context Dependency Parsing

We address the challenge of syntactic parsing for Urdu, a morphologically rich language, and present state-of-the-art results for both constituency and dependency parsing. This paper offers four major contributions: 1) the conversion of the CLE-UTB phrase structure treebank into a dependency treebank by developing language-specific head-word and phrase-to-dependency label mapping rules; 2) a novel sequence labeling scheme that transforms the parsing task into a unified representation; 3) the training of contextualized word representations on a large 220 million tokens Urdu corpus collected from the web; and 4) development of parsing framework using two learning paradigms, single-task and multi-task learning. Several post-processing rules are applied to improve the quality of the automatically converted dependency structure treebank. The proposed sequence labeling scheme enables the use of a shared architecture that learns the syntactic structures from both grammatical structures simultaneously and hence improves generalization. Experiments show that the multi-task learning setup significantly enhances parsing performance, achieving an F1 score of 91.39 for constituency parsing (an improvement of 3.29 points) and a labeled attachment score of 85.69 for dependency parsing (an improvement of 1.49 points). These results demonstrate that learning cross-task representations provides measurable benefits and advances the state of syntactic parsing for Urdu.

We describe THIVLVC, a two-stage system for the EvaLatin 2026 Dependency Parsing task. Given a Latin sentence, we retrieve structurally similar entries from the CIRCSE treebank using sentence length and POS n-gram similarity, then prompt a large language model to refine the baseline parse from UDPipe using the retrieved examples and UD annotation guidelines. We submit two configurations: one without retrieval and one with retrieval (RAG). On poetry (Seneca), THIVLVC improves CLAS by +17 points over the UDPipe baseline; on prose (Thomas Aquinas), the gain is +1.5 CLAS. A double-blind error analysis of 300 divergences between our system and the gold standard reveals that, among unanimous annotator decisions, 53.3% favour THIVLVC, showing annotation inconsistencies both within and across treebanks.

In Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), each edge of a discourse tree carries a nuclearity label, marking which span holds the central content, and a relation drawn from a closed inventory of functional categories. Neither label is a surface property: the same two clauses can be Elaboration or Background depending on rhetorical intent, and the boundary between them is fixed by annotation convention rather than by lexical cues. Predicting these labels therefore requires a formal discourse schema, and exposure to discourse-rich pretraining text does not supply it: given only a target EDU pair, a strong LLM recovers nuclearity at 0.794 F1 and relation at 0.738 F1. We propose RAG-RST, a retrieval-augmented framework that supplies this schema as in-context demonstration rather than through parameter updates, raising nuclearity to 0.846 F1 and relation to 0.788 F1 with no training. Two configurations are compared: a precomputed strategy that labels all EDU pairs before parsing, and a dynamic strategy that retrieves at each reduce step, so that the exemplars reaching the generator depend on the reductions the parser has already committed to. Both outperform existing RST parsers across span, nuclearity, relation, and full tree metrics, with the dynamic variant consistently strongest. Two properties of the retrieved schema emerge: its utility is bounded in number, saturating and then declining beyond fifty exemplars, and it depends on structural position. Both indicate that a formal linguistic schema can be supplied to a foundation model as a demonstration rather than trained into its parameters.