Data-Oriented Parsing with Discontinuous Constituents and Function Tags

Statistical parsers are e ective but are typically limited to producing projective dependencies or constituents. On the other hand, linguisti- cally rich parsers recognize non-local relations and analyze both form and function phenomena but rely on extensive manual grammar development. We combine advantages of the two by building a statistical parser that produces richer analyses. We investigate new techniques to implement treebank-based parsers that allow for discontinuous constituents. We present two systems. One system is based on a string-rewriting Linear Context-Free Rewriting System (LCFRS), while using a Probabilistic Discontinuous Tree Substitution Grammar (PDTSG) to improve disambiguation performance. Another system encodes the discontinuities in the labels of phrase structure trees, allowing for efficient context-free grammar parsing. The two systems demonstrate that tree fragments as used in tree-substitution grammar improve disambiguation performance while capturing non-local relations on an as-needed basis. Additionally, we present results of models that produce function tags, resulting in a more linguistically adequate model of the data. We report substantial accuracy improvements in discontinuous parsing for German, English, and Dutch, including results on spoken Dutch

From high heels to weed attics: a syntactic investigation of chick lit and literature

Abstract Stylometric analysis of prose is typically limited to classification tasks such as authorship attribution. Since the models used are typically black boxes, they give little insight into the stylistic differences they detect. In this paper, we characterize two prose genres syntactically: chick lit (humorous novels on the challenges of being a modern-day urban female) and high literature. First, we develop a top-down computational method based on existing literary-linguistic theory. Using an off-the-shelf parser we obtain syntactic structures for a Dutch corpus of novels and measure the distribution of sentence types in chick-lit and literary novels. The results show that literature contains more complex (subordinating) sentences than chick lit. Secondly, a bottom-up analysis is made of specific morphological and syntactic features in both genres, based on the parser's output. This shows that the two genres can be distinguished along certain features. Our results indicate that detailed insight into stylistic differences can be obtained by combining computational linguistic analysis with literary theory