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

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

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

Parsing algorithms that process the input from left to right and construct a single derivation have often been considered inadequate for natural language parsing because of the massive ambiguity typically found in natural language grammars. Nevertheless, it has been shown that such algorithms, combined with treebank-induced classifiers, can be used to build highly accurate disambiguating parsers, in particular for dependency-based syntactic representations. In this article, we first present a general framework for describing and analyzing algorithms for deterministic incremental dependency parsing, formalized as transition systems. We then describe and analyze two families of such algorithms: stack-based and list-based algorithms. In the former family, which is restricted to projective dependency structures, we describe an arc-eager and an arc-standard variant; in the latter family, we present a projective and a nonprojective variant. For each of the four algorithms, we give proofs of correctness and complexity. In addition, we perform an experimental evaluation of all algorithms in combination with SVM classifiers for predicting the next parsing action, using data from thirteen languages. We show that all four algorithms give competitive accuracy, although the non-projective list-based algorithm generally outperforms the projective algorithms for languages with a non-negligible proportion of non-projective constructions. However, the projective algorithms often produce comparable results when combined with the technique known as pseudo-projective parsing. The linear time complexity of the stack-based algorithms gives them an advantage with respect to efficiency both in learning and in parsing, but the projective list-based algorithm turns out to be equally efficient in practice. Moreover, when the projective algorithms are used to implement pseudo-projective parsing, they sometimes become less efficient in parsing (but not in learning) than the non-projective list-based algorithm. Although most of the algorithms have been partially described in the literature before, this is the first comprehensive analysis and evaluation of the algorithms within a unified framework. 1.

Previous studies of data-driven dependency parsing have shown that the distribution of parsing errors are correlated with theoretical properties of the models used for learning and inference. In this paper, we show how these results can be exploited to improve parsing accuracy by integrating a graph-based and a transition-based model. By letting one model generate features for the other, we consistently improve accuracy for both models, resulting in a significant improvement of the state of the art when evaluated on data sets from the CoNLL-X shared task. 1

We present a novel parser combination scheme that works by reparsing input sentences once they have already been parsed by several different parsers. We apply this idea to dependency and constituent parsing, generating results that surpass state-of-theart

This paper introduces algorithms for nonprojective parsing based on dual decomposition. We focus on parsing algorithms for nonprojective head automata, a generalization of head-automata models to non-projective structures. The dual decomposition algorithms are simple and efficient, relying on standard dynamic programming and minimum spanning tree algorithms. They provably solve an LP relaxation of the non-projective parsing problem. Empirically the LP relaxation is very often tight: for many languages, exact solutions are achieved on over 98 % of test sentences. The accuracy of our models is higher than previous work on a broad range of datasets. 1

We present a two-stage multilingual dependency parser and evaluate it on 13 diverse languages. The first stage is based on the unlabeled dependency parsing models described by McDonald and Pereira (2006) augmented with morphological features for a subset of the languages. The second stage takes the output from the first and labels all the edges in the dependency graph with appropriate syntactic categories using a globally trained sequence classifier over components of the graph. We report results on the CoNLL-X shared task (Buchholz et al., 2006) data sets and present an error analysis. 1

We present a comparative error analysis of the two dominant approaches in datadriven dependency parsing: global, exhaustive, graph-based models, and local, greedy, transition-based models. We show that, in spite of similar performance overall, the two models produce different types of errors, in a way that can be explained by theoretical properties of the two models. This analysis leads to new directions for parser development. 1

Integer Linear Programming has recently been used for decoding in a number of probabilistic models in order to enforce global constraints. However, in certain applications, such as non-projective dependency parsing and machine translation, the complete formulation of the decoding problem as an integer linear program renders solving intractable. We present an approach which solves the problem incrementally, thus we avoid creating intractable integer linear programs. This approach is applied to Dutch dependency parsing and we show how the addition of linguistically motivated constraints can yield a significant improvement over stateof-the-art. 1