Better, Faster, Stronger Sequence Tagging Constituent Parsers

David Vilares, Mostafa Abdou, Anders Søgaard


Abstract
Sequence tagging models for constituent parsing are faster, but less accurate than other types of parsers. In this work, we address the following weaknesses of such constituent parsers: (a) high error rates around closing brackets of long constituents, (b) large label sets, leading to sparsity, and (c) error propagation arising from greedy decoding. To effectively close brackets, we train a model that learns to switch between tagging schemes. To reduce sparsity, we decompose the label set and use multi-task learning to jointly learn to predict sublabels. Finally, we mitigate issues from greedy decoding through auxiliary losses and sentence-level fine-tuning with policy gradient. Combining these techniques, we clearly surpass the performance of sequence tagging constituent parsers on the English and Chinese Penn Treebanks, and reduce their parsing time even further. On the SPMRL datasets, we observe even greater improvements across the board, including a new state of the art on Basque, Hebrew, Polish and Swedish.
Anthology ID:
N19-1341
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Jill Burstein, Christy Doran, Thamar Solorio
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3372–3383
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1341
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-1341
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
David Vilares, Mostafa Abdou, and Anders Søgaard. 2019. Better, Faster, Stronger Sequence Tagging Constituent Parsers. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pages 3372–3383, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Better, Faster, Stronger Sequence Tagging Constituent Parsers (Vilares et al., NAACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1341.pdf
Code
 aghie/tree2labels +  additional community code
Data
Penn Treebank