Fast and Accurate Shift-Reduce Constituent Parsing

Muhua Zhu, Yue Zhang, Wenliang Chen, Min Zhang and Jingbo Zhu

The 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2013)
Sofia, Bulgaria, August 4-9, 2013

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Abstract

Shift-reduce dependency parsers give comparable accuracies to their chart-based counterparts, yet the best shift-reduce constituent parsers still lag behind the state-of-the-art. One important reason is the existence of unary nodes in phrase structure trees, which leads to different numbers of shift-reduce actions between different outputs for the same input. This turns out to have a large empirical impact on the framework of global training and beam search. We propose a simple yet effective extension to the shift-reduce process, which eliminates size differences between action sequences in beam-search. Our parser gives comparable accuracies to the state-of-the-art chart parsers. With linear run-time complexity, our parser is over an order of magnitude faster than the fastest chart parser.

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