Dynamic Head Selection for Neural Lexicalized Constituency Parsing

Yang Hou, Zhenghua Li


Abstract
Lexicalized parsing, which associates constituent nodes with lexical heads, has historically played a crucial role in constituency parsing by bridging constituency and dependency structures. Nevertheless, with the advent of neural networks, lexicalized structures have generally been neglected in favor of unlexicalized, span-based methods. In this paper, we revisit lexicalized parsing and propose a novel latent lexicalization framework that dynamically infers lexical heads during training without relying on predefined head-finding rules. Our method enables the model to learn lexical dependencies directly from data, offering greater adaptability across languages and datasets. Experiments on multiple treebanks demonstrate state-of-the-art or comparable performance. We also analyze the learned dependency structures, headword preferences, and linguistic biases.
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-long.786
Volume:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
16141–16155
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.786/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yang Hou and Zhenghua Li. 2025. Dynamic Head Selection for Neural Lexicalized Constituency Parsing. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 16141–16155, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Dynamic Head Selection for Neural Lexicalized Constituency Parsing (Hou & Li, ACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.786.pdf