An Investigation of the Interactions Between Pre-Trained Word Embeddings, Character Models and POS Tags in Dependency Parsing

Aaron Smith, Miryam de Lhoneux, Sara Stymne, Joakim Nivre


Abstract
We provide a comprehensive analysis of the interactions between pre-trained word embeddings, character models and POS tags in a transition-based dependency parser. While previous studies have shown POS information to be less important in the presence of character models, we show that in fact there are complex interactions between all three techniques. In isolation each produces large improvements over a baseline system using randomly initialised word embeddings only, but combining them quickly leads to diminishing returns. We categorise words by frequency, POS tag and language in order to systematically investigate how each of the techniques affects parsing quality. For many word categories, applying any two of the three techniques is almost as good as the full combined system. Character models tend to be more important for low-frequency open-class words, especially in morphologically rich languages, while POS tags can help disambiguate high-frequency function words. We also show that large character embedding sizes help even for languages with small character sets, especially in morphologically rich languages.
Anthology ID:
D18-1291
Original:
D18-1291v1
Version 2:
D18-1291v2
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October-November
Year:
2018
Address:
Brussels, Belgium
Editors:
Ellen Riloff, David Chiang, Julia Hockenmaier, Jun’ichi Tsujii
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2711–2720
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D18-1291
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D18-1291
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Aaron Smith, Miryam de Lhoneux, Sara Stymne, and Joakim Nivre. 2018. An Investigation of the Interactions Between Pre-Trained Word Embeddings, Character Models and POS Tags in Dependency Parsing. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 2711–2720, Brussels, Belgium. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
An Investigation of the Interactions Between Pre-Trained Word Embeddings, Character Models and POS Tags in Dependency Parsing (Smith et al., EMNLP 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D18-1291.pdf