N19-1018@ACL

Total: 1

#1 Discontinuous Constituency Parsing with a Stack-Free Transition System and a Dynamic Oracle [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi] [REL]

Authors: Maximin Coavoux, Shay B. Cohen

We introduce a novel transition system for discontinuous constituency parsing. Instead of storing subtrees in a stack –i.e. a data structure with linear-time sequential access– the proposed system uses a set of parsing items, with constant-time random access. This change makes it possible to construct any discontinuous constituency tree in exactly 4n–2 transitions for a sentence of length n. At each parsing step, the parser considers every item in the set to be combined with a focus item and to construct a new constituent in a bottom-up fashion. The parsing strategy is based on the assumption that most syntactic structures can be parsed incrementally and that the set –the memory of the parser– remains reasonably small on average. Moreover, we introduce a provably correct dynamic oracle for the new transition system, and present the first experiments in discontinuous constituency parsing using a dynamic oracle. Our parser obtains state-of-the-art results on three English and German discontinuous treebanks.