Bi-directional Attention with Agreement for Dependency Parsing

Hao Cheng1, Hao Fang1, Xiaodong He2, Jianfeng Gao3, Li Deng2
1University of Washington, 2Microsoft Research, 3Microsoft Research, Redmond


Abstract

We develop a novel bi-directional attention model for dependency parsing, which learns to agree on headword predictions from the forward and backward parsing directions. The parsing procedure for each direction is formulated as sequentially querying the memory component that stores continuous headword embeddings. The proposed parser makes use of {\it soft} headword embeddings, allowing the model to implicitly capture high-order parsing history without dramatically increasing the computational complexity. We conduct experiments on English, Chinese, and 12 other languages from the CoNLL 2006 shared task, showing that the proposed model achieves state-of-the-art unlabeled attachment scores on 6 languages.