603 research outputs found
Undirected dependency parsing
Dependency parsers, which are widely used in natural language processing tasks, employ a representation of syntax in which the structure of sentences is expressed in the form of directed links (dependencies) between their words. In this article, we introduce a new approach to transition-based dependency parsing in which the parsing algorithm does not directly construct dependencies, but rather undirected links, which are then assigned a direction in a postprocessing step. We show that this alleviates error propagation, because undirected parsers do not need to observe the single-head constraint, resulting in better accuracy. Undirected parsers can be obtained by transforming existing directed transition-based parsers as long as they satisfy certain conditions. We apply this approach to obtain undirected variants of three different parsers (the Planar, 2-Planar, and Covington algorithms) and perform experiments on several data sets from the CoNLL-X shared tasks and on the Wall Street Journal portion of the Penn Treebank, showing that our approach is successful in reducing error propagation and produces improvements in parsing accuracy in most of the cases and achieving results competitive with state-of-the-art transition-based parsers.Xunta de Galicia | Ref. CN2012/008Xunta de Galicia | Ref. CN2012/317Xunta de Galicia | Ref. CN2012/319Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación | Ref. TIN2010-18552-C03-01Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación | Ref. TIN2010-18552-C03-0
A non-projective greedy dependency parser with bidirectional LSTMs
The LyS-FASTPARSE team presents BIST-COVINGTON, a neural implementation of
the Covington (2001) algorithm for non-projective dependency parsing. The
bidirectional LSTM approach by Kipperwasser and Goldberg (2016) is used to
train a greedy parser with a dynamic oracle to mitigate error propagation. The
model participated in the CoNLL 2017 UD Shared Task. In spite of not using any
ensemble methods and using the baseline segmentation and PoS tagging, the
parser obtained good results on both macro-average LAS and UAS in the big
treebanks category (55 languages), ranking 7th out of 33 teams. In the all
treebanks category (LAS and UAS) we ranked 16th and 12th. The gap between the
all and big categories is mainly due to the poor performance on four parallel
PUD treebanks, suggesting that some `suffixed' treebanks (e.g. Spanish-AnCora)
perform poorly on cross-treebank settings, which does not occur with the
corresponding `unsuffixed' treebank (e.g. Spanish). By changing that, we obtain
the 11th best LAS among all runs (official and unofficial). The code is made
available at https://github.com/CoNLL-UD-2017/LyS-FASTPARSEComment: 12 pages, 2 figures, 5 table
Crossings as a side effect of dependency lengths
The syntactic structure of sentences exhibits a striking regularity:
dependencies tend to not cross when drawn above the sentence. We investigate
two competing explanations. The traditional hypothesis is that this trend
arises from an independent principle of syntax that reduces crossings
practically to zero. An alternative to this view is the hypothesis that
crossings are a side effect of dependency lengths, i.e. sentences with shorter
dependency lengths should tend to have fewer crossings. We are able to reject
the traditional view in the majority of languages considered. The alternative
hypothesis can lead to a more parsimonious theory of language.Comment: the discussion section has been expanded significantly; in press in
Complexity (Wiley
Ensemble Parsing and its Effect on Machine Translation
The focus of much of dependency parsing is on creating new modeling techniques and examining new feature sets for existing dependency models. Often these new models are lucky to achieve equivalent results with the current state of
the art results and often perform worse. These approaches are for languages that are often resource-rich and have ample training data available for dependency parsing. For this reason, the accuracy scores are often quite high. This, by its very nature, makes it quite difficult to create a significantly large increase in the current state-of-the-art. Research in this area is often concerned with small accuracy changes or very specific localized changes, such as increasing accuracy of a particular linguistic construction. With so many modeling techniques available to languages with large resources the problem exists on how to exploit the current techniques with the use of combination, or ensemble, techniques along with this plethora of data.
Dependency parsers are almost ubiquitously evaluated on their accuracy scores, these scores say nothing of the complexity and usefulness of the resulting structures. The structures may have more complexity due to the depth of their co-
ordination or noun phrases. As dependency parses are basic structures in which other systems are built upon, it would seem more reasonable to judge these parsers down the NLP pipeline. The types of parsing errors that cause significant
problems in other NLP applications is currently an unknown
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