This article describes three statistical models for natural language parsing. The models extend methods from probabilistic context-free grammars to lexicalized grammars, leading to approaches in which a parse tree is represented as the sequence of decisions corresponding to a head-centered, top-down derivation of the tree. Independence assumptions then lead to parameters that encode the X-bar schema, subcategorization, ordering of complements, placement of adjuncts, bigram lexical dependencies, wh-movement, and preferences for close attachment. All of these preferences are expressed by probabilities conditioned on lexical heads. The models are evaluated on the Penn Wall Street Journal Treebank, showing that their accuracy is competitive with other models in the literature. To gain a better understanding of the models, we also give results on different constituent types, as well as a breakdown of precision/recall results in recovering various types of dependencies. We analyze various characteristics of the models through experiments on parsing accuracy, by collecting frequencies of various structures in the treebank, and through linguistically motivated examples. Finally, we compare the models to others that have been applied to parsing the treebank, aiming to give some explanation of the difference in performance of the various models

We present a new parser for parsing down to Penn tree-bank style parse trees that achieves 90.1% average precision/recall for sentences of length 40 and less, and 89.5% for sentences of length 100 and less when trained and tested on the previously established [5,9,10,15,17] "stan- dard" sections of the Wall Street Journal tree- bank. This represents a 13% decrease in error rate over the best single-parser results on this corpus [9]. The major technical innova- tion is the use of a "maximum-entropy-inspired" model for conditioning and smoothing that let us successfully to test and combine many different conditioning events. We also present some partial results showing the effects of different conditioning information, including a surprising 2% improvement due to guessing the lexical head's pre-terminal before guessing the lexical head.

In this paper we first propose a new statistical parsing model, which is a generative model of lexicalised context-free gram- mar. We then extend the model to in- clude a probabilistic treatment of both subcategorisation and wh~movement. Results on Wall Street Journal text show that the parser performs at 88.1/87.5% constituent precision/recall, an average improvement of 2.3% over (Collins 96).

We demonstrate that an unlexicalized PCFG can parse much more accurately than previously shown, by making use of simple, linguistically motivated state splits, which break down false independence assumptions latent in a vanilla treebank grammar. Indeed, its

This article considers approaches which rerank the output of an existing probabilistic parser. The base parser produces a set of candidate parses for each input sentence, with associated probabilities that define an initial ranking of these parses. A second model then attempts to improve upon this initial ranking, using additional features of the tree as evidence. The strength of our approach is that it allows a tree to be represented as an arbitrary set of features, without concerns about how these features interact or overlap and without the need to define a derivation or a generative model which takes these features into account. We introduce a new method for the reranking task, based on the boosting approach to ranking problems described in Freund et al. (1998). We apply the boosting method to parsing the Wall Street Journal treebank. The method combined the log-likelihood under a baseline model (that of Collins [1999]) with evidence from an additional 500,000 features over parse trees that were not included in the original model. The new model achieved 89.75 % F-measure, a 13 % relative decrease in F-measure error over the baseline model’s score of 88.2%. The article also introduces a new algorithm for the boosting approach which takes advantage of the sparsity of the feature space in the parsing data. Experiments show significant efficiency gains for the new algorithm over the obvious implementation of the boosting approach. We argue that the method is an appealing alternative—in terms of both simplicity and efficiency—to work on feature selection methods within log-linear (maximum-entropy) models. Although the experiments in this article are on natural language parsing (NLP), the approach should be applicable to many other NLP problems which are naturally framed as ranking tasks, for example, speech recognition, machine translation, or natural language generation.

By a "tree-bank grammar" we mean a context-free grammar created by reading the production rules directly from hand-parsed sentences in a tree bank. Common wisdom has it that such grammars do not perform well, though we know of no published data on the issue. The primary purpose of this paper is to show that the common wisdom is wrong. In particular we present results on a tree-bank grammar based on the Penn Wall Street Journal tree bank. To the best of our knowledge, this grammar out-performs all other non-word-based statistical parsers/grammars on this corpus. That is, it out-performs parsers that consider the input as a string of tags and ignore the actual words of the corpus. 1 Introduction The simplest way to "learn" a context-free grammar from a parsed corpus (a "tree bank"), is to read the grammar off the parsed sentences. That is, if we have the sentence diagrammed in Figure 1 we can read the following rules off this diagram: S ! NP VP NP ! pron VP ! vb NP NP ! dt nn This r...

This paper points out that the Penn lI treebank representations are of the kind predicted to have such an effect, and describes a simple node relabeling transformation that improves a treebank PCFG-based parser's average precision and recall by around 8%, or approximately half of the performance difference between a simple PCFG model and the best broad-coverage parsers available today. This performance variation comes about because any PCFG, and hence the corpus of trees from which the PCFG is induced, embodies independence assumptions about the distribution of words and phrases. The particular independence assumptions implicit in a tree representation can be studied theoretically and investigated empirically by means of a tree transformation / detransformation process

The best aspect of a research environment, in my opinion, is the abundance of bright people with whom you argue, discuss, and nurture your ideas. I thank all of the people at Penn and elsewhere who have given me the feedback that has helped me to separate the good ideas from the bad ideas. I hope that Ihave kept the good ideas in this thesis, and left the bad ideas out! Iwould like toacknowledge the following people for their contribution to my education: I thank my advisor Mitch Marcus, who gave me the intellectual freedom to pursue what I believed to be the best way to approach natural language processing, and also gave me direction when necessary. I also thank Mitch for many fascinating conversations, both personal and professional, over the last four years at Penn. I thank all of my thesis committee members: John La erty from Carnegie Mellon University, Aravind Joshi, Lyle Ungar, and Mark Liberman, for their extremely valuable suggestions and comments about my thesis research. I thank Mike Collins, Jason Eisner, and Dan Melamed, with whom I've had many stimulating and impromptu discussions in the LINC lab. Iowe them much gratitude for their valuable feedback onnumerous rough drafts of papers and thesis chapters.

This paper describes our approach to the development of a Proposition Bank, which involves the addition of semantic information to the Penn English Treebank. Our primary goal is the labeling of syntactic nodes with specific argument labels that preserve the similarity of roles such as the window in John broke the window and the window broke. After motivating the need for explicit predicate argument structure labels, we briefly discuss the theoretical considerations of predicate argument structure and the need to maintain consistency across syntactic alternations. The issues of consistency of argument structure across both polysemous and synonymous verbs are also discussed and we present our actual guidelines for these types of phenomena, along with numerous examples of tagged sentences and verb frames. Metaframes are introduced as a technique for handling similar frames among near− synonymous verbs. We conclude with a summary of the current status of annotation process. 1.

This paper presents a machine learning system for parsing natural language that learns from manually parsed example sentences, and parses unseen data at state-of-the-art accuracies. Its machine learning technology, based on the maximum entropy framework, is highly reusable and not specific to the parsing problem, while the linguistic hints that it uses to learn can be specified concisely. It therefore requires a minimal amount of human effort and linguistic knowledge for its construction. In practice, the running time of the parser on a test sentence is linear with respect to the sentence length. We also demonstrate that the parser can train from other domains without modification to the modeling framework or the linguistic hints it uses to learn. Furthermore, this paper shows that research into rescoring the top 20 parses returned by the parser might yield accuracies dramatically higher than the state-of-the-art.