Johannes Gontrum


2019

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Deep Contextualized Word Embeddings in Transition-Based and Graph-Based Dependency Parsing - A Tale of Two Parsers Revisited
Artur Kulmizev | Miryam de Lhoneux | Johannes Gontrum | Elena Fano | Joakim Nivre
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Transition-based and graph-based dependency parsers have previously been shown to have complementary strengths and weaknesses: transition-based parsers exploit rich structural features but suffer from error propagation, while graph-based parsers benefit from global optimization but have restricted feature scope. In this paper, we show that, even though some details of the picture have changed after the switch to neural networks and continuous representations, the basic trade-off between rich features and global optimization remains essentially the same. Moreover, we show that deep contextualized word embeddings, which allow parsers to pack information about global sentence structure into local feature representations, benefit transition-based parsers more than graph-based parsers, making the two approaches virtually equivalent in terms of both accuracy and error profile. We argue that the reason is that these representations help prevent search errors and thereby allow transition-based parsers to better exploit their inherent strength of making accurate local decisions. We support this explanation by an error analysis of parsing experiments on 13 languages.

2017

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Alto: Rapid Prototyping for Parsing and Translation
Johannes Gontrum | Jonas Groschwitz | Alexander Koller | Christoph Teichmann
Proceedings of the Software Demonstrations of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

We present Alto, a rapid prototyping tool for new grammar formalisms. Alto implements generic but efficient algorithms for parsing, translation, and training for a range of monolingual and synchronous grammar formalisms. It can easily be extended to new formalisms, which makes all of these algorithms immediately available for the new formalism.