Abstract
A wide variety of transition-based algorithms are currently used for dependency parsers. Empirical studies have shown that performance varies across different treebanks in such a way that one algorithm outperforms another on one treebank and the reverse is true for a different treebank. There is often no discernible reason for what causes one algorithm to be more suitable for a certain treebank and less so for another. In this paper we shed some light on this by introducing the concept of an algorithm’s inherent dependency displacement distribution. This characterises the bias of the algorithm in terms of dependency displacement, which quantify both distance and direction of syntactic relations. We show that the similarity of an algorithm’s inherent distribution to a treebank’s displacement distribution is clearly correlated to the algorithm’s parsing performance on that treebank, specificially with highly significant and substantial correlations for the predominant sentence lengths in Universal Dependency treebanks. We also obtain results which show a more discrete analysis of dependency displacement does not result in any meaningful correlations.- Anthology ID:
- 2020.lrec-1.633
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2020
- Address:
- Marseille, France
- Editors:
- Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
- Venue:
- LREC
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- European Language Resources Association
- Note:
- Pages:
- 5147–5155
- Language:
- English
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.633
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Mark Anderson and Carlos Gómez-Rodríguez. 2020. Inherent Dependency Displacement Bias of Transition-Based Algorithms. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 5147–5155, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
- Cite (Informal):
- Inherent Dependency Displacement Bias of Transition-Based Algorithms (Anderson & Gómez-Rodríguez, LREC 2020)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-2023-videos/2020.lrec-1.633.pdf