Abstract

Previous studies in data-driven dependency parsing have shown that tree transformations can improve parsing accuracy for specific parsers and data sets. We investigate to what extent this can be generalized across languages/treebanks and parsers, focusing on pseudo-projective parsing, as a way of capturing non-projective dependencies, and transformations used to facilitate parsing of coordinate structures and verb groups. The results indicate that the beneficial effect of pseudo-projective parsing is independent of parsing strategy but sensitive to language or treebank specific properties. By contrast, the construction specific transformations appear to be more sensitive to parsing strategy but have a constant positive effect over several languages.

Citations