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 formalize weighted dependency parsing as searching for maximum spanning trees (MSTs) in directed graphs. Using this representation, the parsing algorithm of Eisner (1996) is sufficient for searching over all projective trees in O(n 3) time. More surprisingly, the representation is extended naturally to non-projective parsing using Chu-Liu-Edmonds (Chu and Liu, 1965; Edmonds, 1967) MST algorithm, yielding an O(n 2) parsing algorithm. We evaluate these methods on the Prague Dependency Treebank using online large-margin learning techniques (Crammer et al., 2003; McDonald et al., 2005) and show that MST parsing increases efficiency and accuracy for languages with non-projective dependencies. 1

Each year the Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL) 1 features a shared task, in which participants train and test their systems on exactly the same data sets, in order to better compare systems. The tenth CoNLL (CoNLL-X) saw a shared task on Multilingual Dependency Parsing. In this paper, we describe how treebanks for 13 languages were converted into the same dependency format and how parsing performance was measured. We also give an overview of the parsing approaches that participants took and the results that they achieved. Finally, we try to draw general conclusions about multi-lingual parsing: What makes a particular language, treebank or annotation scheme easier or harder to parse and which phenomena are challenging for any dependency parser? Acknowledgement Many thanks to Amit Dubey and Yuval Krymolowski, the other two organizers of the shared task, for discussions, converting treebanks, writing software and helping with the papers. 2

We present an effective training algorithm for linearly-scored dependency parsers that implements online largemargin multi-class training (Crammer and Singer, 2003; Crammer et al., 2003) on top of efficient parsing techniques for dependency trees (Eisner, 1996). The trained parsers achieve a competitive dependency accuracy for both English and Czech with no language specific enhancements. 1

In order to realize the full potential of dependency-based syntactic parsing, it is desirable to allow non-projective dependency structures. We show how a datadriven deterministic dependency parser, in itself restricted to projective structures, can be combined with graph transformation techniques to produce non-projective structures. Experiments using data from the Prague Dependency Treebank show that the combined system can handle nonprojective constructions with a precision sufficient to yield a significant improvement in overall parsing accuracy. This leads to the best reported performance for robust non-projective parsing of Czech. 1

In this paper we extend the maximum spanning tree (MST) dependency parsing framework of McDonald et al. (2005c) to incorporate higher-order feature representations and allow dependency structures with multiple parents per word. We show that those extensions can make the MST framework computationally intractable, but that the intractability can be circumvented with new approximate parsing algorithms. We conclude with experiments showing that discriminative online learning using those approximate algorithms achieves the best reported parsing accuracy for Czech and Danish. 1

Most work in statistical parsing has focused on a single corpus: the Wall Street Journal portion of the Penn Treebank. While this has allowed for quantitative comparison of parsing techniques, it has left open the question of how other types of text might a#ect parser performance, and how portable parsing models are across corpora. We examine these questions by comparing results for the Brown and WSJ corpora, and also consider which parts of the parser's probability model are particularly tuned to the corpus on which it was trained. This leads us to a technique for pruning parameters to reduce the size of the parsing model. 1

Broad coverage, high quality parsers are available for only a handful of languages. A prerequisite for developing broad coverage parsers for more languages is the annotation of text with the desired linguistic representations (also known as “treebanking”). However, syntactic annotation is a labor intensive and time-consuming process, and it is difficult to find linguistically annotated text in sufficient quantities. In this article, we explore using parallel text to help solving the problem of creating syntactic annotation in more languages. The central idea is to annotate the English side of a parallel corpus, project the analysis to the second language, and then train a stochastic analyzer on the resulting noisy annotations. We discuss our background assumptions, describe an initial study on the “projectability ” of syntactic relations, and then present two experiments in which stochastic parsers are developed with minimal human intervention via projection from English. 1

We present a simple and effective semisupervised method for training dependency parsers. We focus on the problem of lexical representation, introducing features that incorporate word clusters derived from a large unannotated corpus. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach in a series of dependency parsing experiments on the Penn Treebank and Prague Dependency Treebank, and we show that the cluster-based features yield substantial gains in performance across a wide range of conditions. For example, in the case of English unlabeled second-order parsing, we improve from a baseline accuracy of 92.02 % to 93.16%, and in the case of Czech unlabeled second-order parsing, we improve from a baseline accuracy of 86.13% to 87.13%. In addition, we demonstrate that our method also improves performance when small amounts of training data are available, and can roughly halve the amount of supervised data required to reach a desired level of performance. 1

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