Evaluating evaluation measures

This paper presents a thorough examination of the validity of three evaluation measures on parser output. We assess parser performance of an unlexicalised probabilistic parser trained on two German treebanks with different annotation schemes and evaluate parsing results using the PARSEVAL metric, the Leaf-Ancestor metric and a dependency-based evaluation. We reject the claim that the T¨uBa-D/Z annotation scheme is more adequate then the TIGER scheme for PCFG parsing and show that PARSEVAL should not be used to compare parser performance for parsers trained on treebanks with different annotation schemes. An analysis of specific error types indicates that the dependency-based evaluation is most appropriate to reflect parse quality

How to compare treebanks

Recent years have seen an increasing interest in developing standards for linguistic annotation, with a focus on the interoperability of the resources. This effort, however, requires a profound knowledge of the advantages and disadvantages of linguistic annotation schemes in order to avoid importing the flaws and weaknesses of existing encoding schemes into the new standards. This paper addresses the question how to compare syntactically annotated corpora and gain insights into the usefulness of specific design decisions. We present an exhaustive evaluation of two German treebanks with crucially different encoding schemes. We evaluate three different parsers trained on the two treebanks and compare results using EVALB, the Leaf-Ancestor metric, and a dependency-based evaluation. Furthermore, we present TePaCoC, a new testsuite for the evaluation of parsers on complex German grammatical constructions. The testsuite provides a well thought-out error classification, which enables us to compare parser output for parsers trained on treebanks with different encoding schemes and provides interesting insights into the impact of treebank annotation schemes on specific constructions like PP attachment or non-constituent coordination

Treebank annotation schemes and parser evaluation for German

Recent studies focussed on the question whether less-congurational languages like German are harder to parse than English, or whether the lower parsing scores are an artefact of treebank encoding schemes and data structures, as claimed by K¨ubler et al. (2006). This claim is based on the assumption that PARSEVAL metrics fully reflect parse quality across treebank encoding schemes. In this paper we present new experiments to test this claim. We use the PARSEVAL metric, the Leaf-Ancestor metric as well as a dependency-based evaluation, and present novel approaches measuring the effect of controlled error insertion on treebank trees and parser output. We also provide extensive past-parsing crosstreebank conversion. The results of the experiments show that, contrary to K¨ubler et al. (2006), the question whether or not German is harder to parse than English remains undecided

Lemmatization and lexicalized statistical parsing of morphologically rich languages: the case of French

This paper shows that training a lexicalized parser on a lemmatized morphologically-rich treebank such as the French Treebank slightly improves parsing results. We also show that lemmatizing a similar in size subset of the English Penn Treebank has almost no effect on parsing performance with gold lemmas and leads to a small drop of performance when automatically assigned lemmas and POS tags are used. This highlights two facts: (i) lemmatization helps to reduce lexicon data-sparseness issues for French, (ii) it also makes the parsing process sensitive to correct assignment of POS tags to unknown words

Overview of the SPMRL 2013 shared task: cross-framework evaluation of parsing morphologically rich languages

This paper reports on the first shared task on statistical parsing of morphologically rich languages (MRLs). The task features data sets from nine languages, each available both in constituency and dependency annotation. We report on the preparation of the data sets, on the proposed parsing scenarios, and on the evaluation metrics for parsing MRLs given different representation types. We present and analyze parsing results obtained by the task participants, and then provide an analysis and comparison of the parsers across languages and frameworks, reported for gold input as well as more realistic parsing scenarios

Overview of the SPMRL 2013 Shared Task: A Cross-Framework Evaluation of Parsing Morphologically Rich Languages

International audienceThis paper reports on the first shared task on statistical parsing of morphologically rich lan- guages (MRLs). The task features data sets from nine languages, each available both in constituency and dependency annotation. We report on the preparation of the data sets, on the proposed parsing scenarios, and on the eval- uation metrics for parsing MRLs given dif- ferent representation types. We present and analyze parsing results obtained by the task participants, and then provide an analysis and comparison of the parsers across languages and frameworks, reported for gold input as well as more realistic parsing scenarios

Deep Tree Transductions - A Short Survey

The paper surveys recent extensions of the Long-Short Term Memory networks to handle tree structures from the perspective of learning non-trivial forms of isomorph structured transductions. It provides a discussion of modern TreeLSTM models, showing the effect of the bias induced by the direction of tree processing. An empirical analysis is performed on real-world benchmarks, highlighting how there is no single model adequate to effectively approach all transduction problems.Comment: To appear in the Proceedings of the 2019 INNS Big Data and Deep Learning (INNSBDDL 2019). arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1809.0909

Why is it so difficult to compare treebanks? TIGER and TüBa-D/Z revisited

This paper is a contribution to the ongoing discussion on treebank annotation schemes and their impact on PCFG parsing results. We provide a thorough comparison of two German treebanks: the TIGER treebank and the TüBa-D/Z. We use simple statistics on sentence length and vocabulary size, and more refined methods such as perplexity and its correlation with PCFG parsing results, as well as a Principal Components Analysis. Finally we present a qualitative evaluation of a set of 100 sentences from the TüBa-D/Z, manually annotated in the TIGER as well as in the TüBa-D/Z annotation scheme, and show that even the existence of a parallel subcorpus does not support a straightforward and easy comparison of both annotation schemes

Statistical parsing of morphologically rich languages (SPMRL): what, how and whither

The term Morphologically Rich Languages (MRLs) refers to languages in which significant information concerning syntactic units and relations is expressed at word-level. There is ample evidence that the application of readily available statistical parsing models to such languages is susceptible to serious performance degradation. The first workshop on statistical parsing of MRLs hosts a variety of contributions which show that despite language-specific idiosyncrasies, the problems associated with parsing MRLs cut across languages and parsing frameworks. In this paper we review the current state-of-affairs with respect to parsing MRLs and point out central challenges. We synthesize the contributions of researchers working on parsing Arabic, Basque, French, German, Hebrew, Hindi and Korean to point out shared solutions across languages. The overarching analysis suggests itself as a source of directions for future investigations