Character-Level Chinese Dependency Parsing via Modeling Latent Intra-Word Structure

Yang Hou, Zhenghua Li


Abstract
Revealing the syntactic structure of sentences in Chinese poses significant challenges for word-level parsers due to the absence of clear word boundaries. To facilitate a transition from word-level to character-level Chinese dependency parsing, this paper proposes modeling latent internal structures within words. In this way, each word-level dependency tree is interpreted as a forest of character-level trees. A constrained Eisner algorithm is implemented to ensure the compatibility of character-level trees, guaranteeing a single root for intra-word structures and establishing inter-word dependencies between these roots. Experiments on Chinese treebanks demonstrate the superiority of our method over both the pipeline framework and previous joint models. A detailed analysis reveals that a coarse-to-fine parsing strategy empowers the model to predict more linguistically plausible intra-word structures.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.173
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2943–2956
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.173
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-acl.173
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yang Hou and Zhenghua Li. 2024. Character-Level Chinese Dependency Parsing via Modeling Latent Intra-Word Structure. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024, pages 2943–2956, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Character-Level Chinese Dependency Parsing via Modeling Latent Intra-Word Structure (Hou & Li, Findings 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.173.pdf