Three New Probabilistic Models for Dependency Parsing: An Exploration

After presenting a novel O(n^3) parsing algorithm for dependency grammar, we develop three contrasting ways to stochasticize it. We propose (a) a lexical affinity model where words struggle to modify each other, (b) a sense tagging model where words fluctuate randomly in their selectional preferences, and (c) a generative model where the speaker fleshes out each word's syntactic and conceptual structure without regard to the implications for the hearer. We also give preliminary empirical results from evaluating the three models' parsing performance on annotated Wall Street Journal training text (derived from the Penn Treebank). In these results, the generative (i.e., top-down) model performs significantly better than the others, and does about equally well at assigning part-of-speech tags.Comment: 6 pages, LaTeX 2.09 packaged with 4 .eps files, also uses colap.sty and acl.bs

Hexatagging: Projective Dependency Parsing as Tagging

We introduce a novel dependency parser, the hexatagger, that constructs dependency trees by tagging the words in a sentence with elements from a finite set of possible tags. In contrast to many approaches to dependency parsing, our approach is fully parallelizable at training time, i.e., the structure-building actions needed to build a dependency parse can be predicted in parallel to each other. Additionally, exact decoding is linear in time and space complexity. Furthermore, we derive a probabilistic dependency parser that predicts hexatags using no more than a linear model with features from a pretrained language model, i.e., we forsake a bespoke architecture explicitly designed for the task. Despite the generality and simplicity of our approach, we achieve state-of-the-art performance of 96.4 LAS and 97.4 UAS on the Penn Treebank test set. Additionally, our parser's linear time complexity and parallelism significantly improve computational efficiency, with a roughly 10-times speed-up over previous state-of-the-art models during decoding.Comment: accepted at ACL 202

Dependency parsing resources for French: Converting acquired lexical functional grammar F-Structure annotations and parsing F-Structures directly

Recent years have seen considerable success in the generation of automatically obtained wide-coverage deep grammars for natural language processing, given reliable and large CFG-like treebanks. For research within Lexical Functional Grammar framework, these deep grammars are typically based on an extended PCFG parsing scheme from which dependencies are extracted. However, increasing success in statistical dependency parsing suggests that such deep grammar approaches to statistical parsing could be streamlined. We explore this novel approach to deep grammar parsing within the framework of LFG in this paper, for French, showing that best results (an f-score of 69.46) for the established integrated architecture may be obtained for French

A syntactic language model based on incremental CCG parsing

Syntactically-enriched language models (parsers) constitute a promising component in applications such as machine translation and speech-recognition. To maintain a useful level of accuracy, existing parsers are non-incremental and must span a combinatorially growing space of possible structures as every input word is processed. This prohibits their incorporation into standard linear-time decoders. In this paper, we present an incremental, linear-time dependency parser based on Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) and classification techniques. We devise a deterministic transform of CCGbank canonical derivations into incremental ones, and train our parser on this data. We discover that a cascaded, incremental version provides an appealing balance between efficiency and accuracy

A syntactified direct translation model with linear-time decoding

Recent syntactic extensions of statistical translation models work with a synchronous context-free or tree-substitution grammar extracted from an automatically parsed parallel corpus. The decoders accompanying these extensions typically exceed quadratic time complexity. This paper extends the Direct Translation Model 2 (DTM2) with syntax while maintaining linear-time decoding. We employ a linear-time parsing algorithm based on an eager, incremental interpretation of Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG). As every input word is processed, the local parsing decisions resolve ambiguity eagerly, by selecting a single supertag–operator pair for extending the dependency parse incrementally. Alongside translation features extracted from the derived parse tree, we explore syntactic features extracted from the incremental derivation process. Our empirical experiments show that our model significantly outperforms the state-of-the art DTM2 system