Structured sentiment analysis (SSA) aims to automatically extract people's opinions from a text in natural language and adequately represent that information in a graph structure. One of the most accurate methods for performing SSA was recently proposed and consists of approaching it as a dependency parsing task. Although we can find in the literature how transition-based algorithms excel in dependency parsing in terms of accuracy and efficiency, all proposed attempts to tackle SSA following that approach were based on graph-based models. In this article, we present the first transition-based method to address SSA as dependency parsing. Specifically, we design a transition system that processes the input text in a left-to-right pass, incrementally generating the graph structure containing all identified opinions. To effectively implement our final transition-based model, we resort to a Pointer Network architecture as a backbone. From an extensive evaluation, we demonstrate that our model offers the best performance to date in practically all cases among prior dependency-based methods, and surpass recent task-specific techniques on the most challenging datasets. We additionally include an in-depth analysis and empirically prove that the overall time-complexity cost of our approach is quadratic in the sentence length, being more efficient than top-performing graph-based parsers.
Weighted pushdown automata (WPDAs) are at the core of many natural language processing tasks, like syntax-based statistical machine translation and transition-based dependency parsing. As most existing dynamic programming algorithms are designed for context-free grammars (CFGs), algorithms for PDAs often resort to a PDA-to-CFG conversion. In this paper, we develop novel algorithms that operate directly on WPDAs. Our algorithms are inspired by Lang's algorithm, but use a more general definition of pushdown automaton and either reduce the space requirements by a factor of $|\Gamma|$ (the size of the stack alphabet) or reduce the runtime by a factor of more than $|Q|$ (the number of states). When run on the same class of PDAs as Lang's algorithm, our algorithm is both more space-efficient by a factor of $|\Gamma|$ and more time-efficient by a factor of $|Q| \cdot |\Gamma|$.
We study the effect of rich supertag features in greedy transition-based dependency parsing. While previous studies have shown that sparse boolean features representing the 1-best supertag of a word can improve parsing accuracy, we show that we can get further improvements by adding a continuous vector representation of the entire supertag distribution for a word. In this way, we achieve the best results for greedy transition-based parsing with supertag features with $88.6\%$ LAS and $90.9\%$ UASon the English Penn Treebank converted to Stanford Dependencies.
Syntactic parsing using dependency structures has become a standard technique in natural language processing with many different parsing models, in particular data-driven models that can be trained on syntactically annotated corpora. In this paper, we tackle transition-based dependency parsing using a Perceptron Learner. Our proposed model, which adds more relevant features to the Perceptron Learner, outperforms a baseline arc-standard parser. We beat the UAS of the MALT and LSTM parsers. We also give possible ways to address parsing of non-projective trees.
In recent years, dependency parsing is a fascinating research topic and has a lot of applications in natural language processing. In this paper, we present an effective approach to improve dependency parsing by utilizing supertag features. We performed experiments with the transition-based dependency parsing approach because it can take advantage of rich features. Empirical evaluation on Vietnamese Dependency Treebank showed that, we achieved an improvement of 18.92% in labeled attachment score with gold supertags and an improvement of 3.57% with automatic supertags.
We propose the Graph2Graph Transformer architecture for conditioning on and predicting arbitrary graphs, and apply it to the challenging task of transition-based dependency parsing. After proposing two novel Transformer models of transition-based dependency parsing as strong baselines, we show that adding the proposed mechanisms for conditioning on and predicting graphs of Graph2Graph Transformer results in significant improvements, both with and without BERT pre-training. The novel baselines and their integration with Graph2Graph Transformer significantly outperform the state-of-the-art in traditional transition-based dependency parsing on both English Penn Treebank, and 13 languages of Universal Dependencies Treebanks. Graph2Graph Transformer can be integrated with many previous structured prediction methods, making it easy to apply to a wide range of NLP tasks.
We present paired learning and inference algorithms for significantly reducing computation and increasing speed of the vector dot products in the classifiers that are at the heart of many NLP components. This is accomplished by partitioning the features into a sequence of templates which are ordered such that high confidence can often be reached using only a small fraction of all features. Parameter estimation is arranged to maximize accuracy and early confidence in this sequence. Our approach is simpler and better suited to NLP than other related cascade methods. We present experiments in left-to-right part-of-speech tagging, named entity recognition, and transition-based dependency parsing. On the typical benchmarking datasets we can preserve POS tagging accuracy above 97% and parsing LAS above 88.5% both with over a five-fold reduction in run-time, and NER F1 above 88 with more than 2x increase in speed.
We propose a technique for learning representations of parser states in transition-based dependency parsers. Our primary innovation is a new control structure for sequence-to-sequence neural networks---the stack LSTM. Like the conventional stack data structures used in transition-based parsing, elements can be pushed to or popped from the top of the stack in constant time, but, in addition, an LSTM maintains a continuous space embedding of the stack contents. This lets us formulate an efficient parsing model that captures three facets of a parser's state: (i) unbounded look-ahead into the buffer of incoming words, (ii) the complete history of actions taken by the parser, and (iii) the complete contents of the stack of partially built tree fragments, including their internal structures. Standard backpropagation techniques are used for training and yield state-of-the-art parsing performance.
We present structured perceptron training for neural network transition-based dependency parsing. We learn the neural network representation using a gold corpus augmented by a large number of automatically parsed sentences. Given this fixed network representation, we learn a final layer using the structured perceptron with beam-search decoding. On the Penn Treebank, our parser reaches 94.26% unlabeled and 92.41% labeled attachment accuracy, which to our knowledge is the best accuracy on Stanford Dependencies to date. We also provide in-depth ablative analysis to determine which aspects of our model provide the largest gains in accuracy.
We propose a simple, scalable, fully generative model for transition-based dependency parsing with high accuracy. The model, parameterized by Hierarchical Pitman-Yor Processes, overcomes the limitations of previous generative models by allowing fast and accurate inference. We propose an efficient decoding algorithm based on particle filtering that can adapt the beam size to the uncertainty in the model while jointly predicting POS tags and parse trees. The UAS of the parser is on par with that of a greedy discriminative baseline. As a language model, it obtains better perplexity than a n-gram model by performing semi-supervised learning over a large unlabelled corpus. We show that the model is able to generate locally and syntactically coherent sentences, opening the door to further applications in language generation.
We present a novel neural network model that learns POS tagging and graph-based dependency parsing jointly. Our model uses bidirectional LSTMs to learn feature representations shared for both POS tagging and dependency parsing tasks, thus handling the feature-engineering problem. Our extensive experiments, on 19 languages from the Universal Dependencies project, show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art neural network-based Stack-propagation model for joint POS tagging and transition-based dependency parsing, resulting in a new state of the art. Our code is open-source and available together with pre-trained models at: https://github.com/datquocnguyen/jPTDP
We first present a minimal feature set for transition-based dependency parsing, continuing a recent trend started by Kiperwasser and Goldberg (2016a) and Cross and Huang (2016a) of using bi-directional LSTM features. We plug our minimal feature set into the dynamic-programming framework of Huang and Sagae (2010) and Kuhlmann et al. (2011) to produce the first implementation of worst-case O(n^3) exact decoders for arc-hybrid and arc-eager transition systems. With our minimal features, we also present O(n^3) global training methods. Finally, using ensembles including our new parsers, we achieve the best unlabeled attachment score reported (to our knowledge) on the Chinese Treebank and the "second-best-in-class" result on the English Penn Treebank.
In this paper, we present an approach to improve the accuracy of a strong transition-based dependency parser by exploiting dependency language models that are extracted from a large parsed corpus. We integrated a small number of features based on the dependency language models into the parser. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we evaluate our parser on standard English and Chinese data where the base parser could achieve competitive accuracy scores. Our enhanced parser achieved state-of-the-art accuracy on Chinese data and competitive results on English data. We gained a large absolute improvement of one point (UAS) on Chinese and 0.5 points for English.
We present a simple LSTM-based transition-based dependency parser. Our model is composed of a single LSTM hidden layer replacing the hidden layer in the usual feed-forward network architecture. We also propose a new initialization method that uses the pre-trained weights from a feed-forward neural network to initialize our LSTM-based model. We also show that using dropout on the input layer has a positive effect on performance. Our final parser achieves a 93.06% unlabeled and 91.01% labeled attachment score on the Penn Treebank. We additionally replace LSTMs with GRUs and Elman units in our model and explore the effectiveness of our initialization method on individual gates constituting all three types of RNN units.
Many natural language processing tasks can be modeled into structured prediction and solved as a search problem. In this paper, we distill an ensemble of multiple models trained with different initialization into a single model. In addition to learning to match the ensemble's probability output on the reference states, we also use the ensemble to explore the search space and learn from the encountered states in the exploration. Experimental results on two typical search-based structured prediction tasks -- transition-based dependency parsing and neural machine translation show that distillation can effectively improve the single model's performance and the final model achieves improvements of 1.32 in LAS and 2.65 in BLEU score on these two tasks respectively over strong baselines and it outperforms the greedy structured prediction models in previous literatures.