In recent years, many researchers have leveraged structural information from dependency trees to improve Named Entity Recognition (NER). Most of their methods take dependency-tree labels as input features for NER model training. However, such dependency information is not inherently provided in most NER corpora, making the methods with low usability in practice. To effectively exploit the potential of word-dependency knowledge, motivated by the success of Multi-Task Learning on cross-domain NER, we investigate a novel NER learning method incorporating cross-domain Dependency Parsing (DP) as its auxiliary learning task. Then, considering the high consistency of word-dependency relations across domains, we present an unsupervised domain-adapted method to transfer word-dependency knowledge from high-resource domains to low-resource ones. With the help of cross-domain DP to bridge different domains, both useful cross-domain and cross-task knowledge can be learned by our model to considerably benefit cross-domain NER. To make better use of the cross-task knowledge between NER and DP, we unify both tasks in a shared network architecture for joint learning, using Maximum Mean Discrepancy(MMD). Finally, through extensive experiments, we show our proposed method can not only effectively take advantage of word-dependency knowledge, but also significantly outperform other Multi-Task Learning methods on cross-domain NER. Our code is open-source and available at https://github.com/xianghuisun/DADP.

Abstractive text summarization is a challenging task, and one need to design a mechanism to effectively extract salient information from the source text and then generate a summary. A parsing process of the source text contains critical syntactic or semantic structures, which is useful to generate more accurate summary. However, modeling a parsing tree for text summarization is not trivial due to its non-linear structure and it is harder to deal with a document that includes multiple sentences and their parsing trees. In this paper, we propose to use a graph to connect the parsing trees from the sentences in a document and utilize the stacked graph convolutional networks (GCNs) to learn the syntactic representation for a document. The selective attention mechanism is used to extract salient information in semantic and structural aspect and generate an abstractive summary. We evaluate our approach on the CNN/Daily Mail text summarization dataset. The experimental results show that the proposed GCNs based selective attention approach outperforms the baselines and achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the dataset.