Improved Inference for Unlexicalized Parsing

We present several improvements to unlexicalized parsing with hierarchically state-split PCFGs. First, we present a novel coarse-to-fine method in which a grammar’s own hierarchical projections are used for incremental pruning, including a method for efficiently computing projections of a grammar without a treebank. In our experiments, hierarchical pruning greatly accelerates parsing with no loss in empirical accuracy. Second, we compare various inference procedures for state-split PCFGs from the standpoint of risk minimization, paying particular attention to their practical tradeoffs. Finally, we present multilingual experiments which show that parsing with hierarchical state-splitting is fast and accurate in multiple languages and domains, even without any language-specific tuning.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: NAACL
• Authors: Slav Petrov, Dan Klein
• Keywords: Computational Linguistics, Hierarchical, Hierarchical Projections, NAACL 2007, Parsing