Transition-Based Techniques for Non-Projective Dependency Parsing

Authors

  • Marco Kuhlmann Uppsala University. Department of Linguistics and Philology, Sweden
  • Joakim Nivre Uppsala University. Department of Linguistics and Philology, Sweden

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.3384/nejlt.2000-1533.10211

Abstract

We present an empirical evaluation of three methods for the treatment of non-projective structures in transition-based dependency parsing: pseudo-projective parsing, non-adjacent arc transitions, and online reordering. We compare both the theoretical coverage and the empirical performance of these methods using data from Czech, English and German. The results show that although online reordering is the only method with complete theoretical coverage, all three techniques exhibit high precision but somewhat lower recall on non-projective dependencies and can all improve overall parsing accuracy provided that non-projective dependencies are frequent enough. We also find that the use of non-adjacent arc transitions may lead to a drop in accuracy on projective dependencies in the presence of long-distance non-projective dependencies, an effect that is not found for the two other techniques.

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Published

2010-10-01

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