9 research outputs found
Faster shift-reduce constituent parsing with a non-binary, bottom-up strategy
© 2019. This is the final peer-reviewed manuscript that was accepted for publication at Artificial Intelligence and made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. This may not reflect subsequent changes resulting from the publishing process such as editing, formatting, pagination, and other quality control mechanisms. The final journal publication is available at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.artint.2019.07.006[Absctract]: An increasingly wide range of artificial intelligence applications rely on syntactic information to process and extract meaning from natural language text or speech, with constituent trees being one of the most widely used syntactic formalisms. To produce these phrase-structure representations from sentences in natural language, shift-reduce constituent parsers have become one of the most efficient approaches. Increasing their accuracy and speed is still one of the main objectives pursued by the research community so that artificial intelligence applications that make use of parsing outputs, such as machine translation or voice assistant services, can improve their performance. With this goal in mind, we propose in this article a novel non-binary shift-reduce algorithm for constituent parsing. Our parser follows a classical bottom-up strategy but, unlike others, it straightforwardly creates non-binary branchings with just one
transition, instead of requiring prior binarization or a sequence of binary transitions, allowing its direct application to any language without the need of further resources such as percolation tables. As a result, it uses fewer transitions per sentence than existing transition-based constituent parsers, becoming the fastest such system and, as a consequence, speeding up downstream applications. Using static oracle training and greedy search, the accuracy of this novel approach is on par with state-of-the-art transition-based constituent parsers and outperforms all top-down and bottom-up greedy shift-reduce systems on the Wall Street Journal section from the English Penn Treebank and the Penn Chinese Treebank. Additionally, we develop a dynamic oracle for training the proposed transition-based algorithm, achieving further improvements in both benchmarks and obtaining the best accuracy to date on the Penn Chinese Treebank among greedy shift-reduce parsers.This work has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC), under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (FASTPARSE, grant agreement No 714150), from the ANSWER-ASAP project (TIN2017-85160-C2-1-R) from MINECO, and from Xunta de Galicia (ED431B 2017/01).Xunta de Galicia; ED431B 2017/0
Constituent Parsing as Sequence Labeling
We introduce a method to reduce constituent parsing to sequence labeling. For
each word w_t, it generates a label that encodes: (1) the number of ancestors
in the tree that the words w_t and w_{t+1} have in common, and (2) the
nonterminal symbol at the lowest common ancestor. We first prove that the
proposed encoding function is injective for any tree without unary branches. In
practice, the approach is made extensible to all constituency trees by
collapsing unary branches. We then use the PTB and CTB treebanks as testbeds
and propose a set of fast baselines. We achieve 90.7% F-score on the PTB test
set, outperforming the Vinyals et al. (2015) sequence-to-sequence parser. In
addition, sacrificing some accuracy, our approach achieves the fastest
constituent parsing speeds reported to date on PTB by a wide margin.Comment: EMNLP 2018 (Long Papers). Revised version with improved results after
fixing evaluation bu
Better, Faster, Stronger Sequence Tagging Constituent Parsers
Sequence tagging models for constituent parsing are faster, but less accurate
than other types of parsers. In this work, we address the following weaknesses
of such constituent parsers: (a) high error rates around closing brackets of
long constituents, (b) large label sets, leading to sparsity, and (c) error
propagation arising from greedy decoding. To effectively close brackets, we
train a model that learns to switch between tagging schemes. To reduce
sparsity, we decompose the label set and use multi-task learning to jointly
learn to predict sublabels. Finally, we mitigate issues from greedy decoding
through auxiliary losses and sentence-level fine-tuning with policy gradient.
Combining these techniques, we clearly surpass the performance of sequence
tagging constituent parsers on the English and Chinese Penn Treebanks, and
reduce their parsing time even further. On the SPMRL datasets, we observe even
greater improvements across the board, including a new state of the art on
Basque, Hebrew, Polish and Swedish.Comment: NAACL 2019 (long papers). Contains corrigendu
Natural Language Parsing : Progress and Challenges
[Abstract] Natural language parsing is the task of automatically obtaining the syntactic structure of sentences written in a human language. Parsing is a crucial step for language processing systems that need to extract meaning from text or speech, and thus a key technology of artificial intelligence. This article presents an outline of the current state of the art in this field, as well as reflections on the main challenges that, in the author's opinion, it is currently facing: limitations in accuracy on especially difficult languages and domains, psycholinguistic adequacy, and speed.Xunta de Galicia; ED431B 2017/01Ministerio de EconomĂa y Competitividad; FFI2014-51978-C2-2-RMinisterio de EconomĂa y Competitividad; TIN2017-85160-C2-1-