  We explore the link between the extent to which syntactic relations are
preserved in translation and the ease of correctly constructing a parse tree in
a zero-shot setting. While previous work suggests such a relation, it tends to
focus on the macro level and not on the level of individual edges-a gap we aim
to address. As a test case, we take the transfer of Universal Dependencies (UD)
parsing from English to a diverse set of languages and conduct two sets of
experiments. In one, we analyze zero-shot performance based on the extent to
which English source edges are preserved in translation. In another, we apply
three linguistically motivated transformations to UD, creating more
cross-lingually stable versions of it, and assess their zero-shot parsability.
In order to compare parsing performance across different schemes, we perform
extrinsic evaluation on the downstream task of cross-lingual relation
extraction (RE) using a subset of a popular English RE benchmark translated to
Russian and Korean. In both sets of experiments, our results suggest a strong
relation between cross-lingual stability and zero-shot parsing performance.
