MaltOptimizer: A System for MaltParser Optimization

Miguel Ballesteros, Joakim Nivre


Abstract
Freely available statistical parsers often require careful optimization to produce state-of-the-art results, which can be a non-trivial task especially for application developers who are not interested in parsing research for its own sake. We present MaltOptimizer, a freely available tool developed to facilitate parser optimization using the open-source system MaltParser, a data-driven parser-generator that can be used to train dependency parsers given treebank data. MaltParser offers a wide range of parameters for optimization, including nine different parsing algorithms, two different machine learning libraries (each with a number of different learners), and an expressive specification language that can be used to define arbitrarily rich feature models. MaltOptimizer is an interactive system that first performs an analysis of the training set in order to select a suitable starting point for optimization and then guides the user through the optimization of parsing algorithm, feature model, and learning algorithm. Empirical evaluation on data from the CoNLL 2006 and 2007 shared tasks on dependency parsing shows that MaltOptimizer consistently improves over the baseline of default settings and sometimes even surpasses the result of manual optimization.
Anthology ID:
L12-1415
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)
Month:
May
Year:
2012
Address:
Istanbul, Turkey
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Mehmet Uğur Doğan, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
2757–2763
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/715_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Miguel Ballesteros and Joakim Nivre. 2012. MaltOptimizer: A System for MaltParser Optimization. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12), pages 2757–2763, Istanbul, Turkey. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
MaltOptimizer: A System for MaltParser Optimization (Ballesteros & Nivre, LREC 2012)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/715_Paper.pdf