An open source rule induction tool for transfer-based SMT

In this paper we describe an open source tool for automatic induction of transfer rules. Transfer rule induction is carried out on pairs of dependency structures and their node alignment to produce all rules consistent with the node alignment. We describe an efficient algorithm for rule induction and give a detailed description of how to use the tool

Automatic acquisition of LFG resources for German - as good as it gets

We present data-driven methods for the acquisition of LFG resources from two German treebanks. We discuss problems specific to semi-free word order languages as well as problems arising fromthe data structures determined by the design of the different treebanks. We compare two ways of encoding semi-free word order, as done in the two German treebanks, and argue that the design of the TiGer treebank is more adequate for the acquisition of LFG resources. Furthermore, we describe an architecture for LFG grammar acquisition for German, based on the two German treebanks, and compare our results with a hand-crafted German LFG grammar

Packed rules for automatic transfer-rule induction

We present a method of encoding transfer rules in a highly efficient packed structure using contextualized constraints (Maxwell and Kaplan, 1991), an existing method of encoding adopted from LFG parsing (Kaplan and Bresnan, 1982; Bresnan, 2001; Dalrymple, 2001). The packed representation allows us to encode O(2n) transfer rules in a single packed representation only requiring O(n) storage space. Besides reducing space requirements, the representation also has a high impact on the amount of time taken to load large numbers of transfer rules to memory with very little trade-off in time needed to unpack the rules. We include an experimental evaluation which shows a considerable reduction in space and time requirements for a large set of automatically induced transfer rules by storing the rules in the packed representation

Preparing, restructuring, and augmenting a French treebank: lexicalised parsers or coherent treebanks?

We present the Modified French Treebank (MFT), a completely revamped French Treebank, derived from the Paris 7 Treebank (P7T), which is cleaner, more coherent, has several transformed structures, and introduces new linguistic analyses. To determine the effect of these changes, we investigate how theMFT fares in statistical parsing. Probabilistic parsers trained on the MFT training set (currently 3800 trees) already perform better than their counterparts trained on five times the P7T data (18,548 trees), providing an extreme example of the importance of data quality over quantity in statistical parsing. Moreover, regression analysis on the learning curve of parsers trained on the MFT lead to the prediction that parsers trained on the full projected 18,548 tree MFT training set will far outscore their counterparts trained on the full P7T. These analyses also show how problematic data can lead to problematic conclusions–in particular, we find that lexicalisation in the probabilistic parsing of French is probably not as crucial as was once thought (Arun and Keller (2005))

TTS – A Treebank Tool Suite

Treebanks are important resources in descriptive, theoretical and computational linguistic research, development and teaching. This paper presents a treebank tool suite (TTS) for and derived from the Penn-II treebank resource (Marcus et al, 1993). The tools include treebank inspection and viewing options which support search for CF-PSG rule tokens extracted from the treebank, graphical display of complete trees containing the rule instance, display of subtrees rooted by the rule instance and display of the yield of the subtree (with or without context). The search can be further restricted by constraining the yield to contain particular strings. Rules can be ordered by frequency and the user can set frequency thresholds. To process new text, the tool suite provides a PCFG chart parser (based on the CYK algorithm) operating on CFG grammars extracted from the treebank following the method of (Charniak, 1996) as well as a HMM bi-/trigram tagger trained on the tagged version of the treebank resource. The system is implemented in Java and Perl. We employ the InterArbora module based on the Thistle display engine (LTG, 2001) as our tree grapher

Improving treebank-based automatic LFG induction for Spanish

We describe several improvements to the method of treebank-based LFG induction for Spanish from the Cast3LB treebank (O’Donovan et al., 2005). We discuss the different categories of problems encountered and present the solutions adopted. Some of the problems involve a simple adoption of existing linguistic analyses, as in our treatment of clitic doubling and null subjects. In other cases there is no standard LFG account for the phenomenon we wish to model and we adopt a compromise, conservative solution. This is exemplified by our treatment of Spanish periphrastic constructions. In yet another case, the less configurational nature of Spanish means that the LFG annotation algorithm has to rely mostly on Cast3LB function tags, and consequently a reliable method of adding those tags to parse trees had to be developed. This method achieves over 6% improvement over the baseline for the Cast3LB-function-tag assignment task, and over 3% improvement over the baseline for LFG f-structure construction from function-tag-enriched trees

Treebank-based acquisition of LFG parsing resources for French

Motivated by the expense in time and other resources to produce hand-crafted grammars, there has been increased interest in automatically obtained wide-coverage grammars from treebanks for natural language processing. In particular, recent years have seen the growth in interest in automatically obtained deep resources that can represent information absent from simple CFG-type structured treebanks and which are considered to produce more language-neutral linguistic representations, such as dependency syntactic trees. As is often the case in early pioneering work on natural language processing, English has provided the focus of first efforts towards acquiring deep-grammar resources, followed by successful treatments of, for example, German, Japanese, Chinese and Spanish. However, no comparable large-scale automatically acquired deep-grammar resources have been obtained for French to date. The goal of this paper is to present the application of treebank-based language acquisition to the case of French. We show that with modest changes to the established parsing architectures, encouraging results can be obtained for French, with a best dependency structure f-score of 86.73%

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

Using machine-learning to assign function labels to parser output for Spanish

Data-driven grammatical function tag assignment has been studied for English using the Penn-II Treebank data. In this paper we address the question of whether such methods can be applied successfully to other languages and treebank resources. In addition to tag assignment accuracy and f-scores we also present results of a task-based evaluation. We use three machine-learning methods to assign Cast3LB function tags to sentences parsed with Bikel’s parser trained on the Cast3LB treebank. The best performing method, SVM, achieves an f-score of 86.87% on gold-standard trees and 66.67% on parser output - a statistically significant improvement of 6.74% over the baseline. In a task-based evaluation we generate LFG functional-structures from the function tag-enriched trees. On this task we achive an f-score of 75.67%, a statistically significant 3.4% improvement over the baseline

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