We investigate the effectiveness of selftraining PCFG grammars with latent annotations (PCFG-LA) for parsing languages with different amounts of labeled training data. Compared to Charniak’s lexicalized parser, the PCFG-LA parser was more effectively adapted to a language for which parsing has been less well developed (i.e., Chinese) and benefited more from selftraining. We show for the first time that self-training is able to significantly improve the performance of the PCFG-LA parser, a single generative parser, on both small and large amounts of labeled training data. Our approach achieves stateof-the-art parsing accuracies for a single parser on both English (91.5%) and Chinese (85.2%). 1

We show that the automatically induced latent variable grammars of Petrov et al. (2006) vary widely in their underlying representations, depending on their EM initialization point. We use this to our advantage, combining multiple automatically learned grammars into an unweighted product model, which gives significantly improved performance over state-ofthe-art individual grammars. In our model, the probability of a constituent is estimated as a product of posteriors obtained from multiple grammars that differ only in the random seed used for initialization, without any learning or tuning of combination weights. Despite its simplicity, a product of eight automatically learned grammars improves parsing accuracy from 90.2 % to 91.8 % on English, and from 80.3 % to 84.5 % on German. 1

We present a simple but accurate parser which exploits both large tree fragments and symbol refinement. We parse with all fragments of the training set, in contrast to much recent work on tree selection in data-oriented parsing and treesubstitution grammar learning. We require only simple, deterministic grammar symbol refinement, in contrast to recent work on latent symbol refinement. Moreover, our parser requires no explicit lexicon machinery, instead parsing input sentences as character streams. Despite its simplicity, our parser achieves accuracies of over 88 % F1 on the standard English WSJ task, which is competitive with substantially more complicated state-of-theart lexicalized and latent-variable parsers. Additional specific contributions center on making implicit all-fragments parsing efficient, including a coarse-to-fine inference scheme and a new graph encoding. 1

We propose a new fast purely discriminative algorithm for natural language parsing, based on a “deep ” recurrent convolutional graph transformer network (GTN). Assuming a decomposition of a parse tree into a stack of “levels”, the network predicts a level of the tree taking into account predictions of previous levels. Using only few basic text features, we show similar performance (in F1 score) to existing pure discriminative parsers and existing “benchmark ” parsers (like Collins parser, probabilistic context-free grammars based), with a huge speed advantage. 1

Latent variable grammars take an observed (coarse) treebank and induce more fine-grained grammar categories, that are better suited for modeling the syntax of natural languages. Estimation can be done in a generative or a discriminative framework, and results in the best published parsing accuracies over a wide range of syntactically divergent languages and domains. In this paper we highlight the commonalities and the differences between the two learning paradigms. 1

Linear models have enjoyed great success in structured prediction in NLP. While a lot of progress has been made on efficient training with several loss functions, the problem of endowing learners with a mechanism for feature selection is still unsolved. Common approaches employ ad hoc filtering or L1regularization; both ignore the structure of the feature space, preventing practicioners from encoding structural prior knowledge. We fill this gap by adopting regularizers that promote structured sparsity, along with efficient algorithms to handle them. Experiments on three tasks (chunking, entity recognition, and dependency parsing) show gains in performance, compactness, and model interpretability. 1

Linear models have enjoyed great success in structured prediction in NLP. While a lot of progress has been made on efficient training with several loss functions, the problem of endowing learners with a mechanism for feature selection is still unsolved. Common approaches employ ad hoc filtering or L1regularization; both ignore the structure of the feature space, preventing practicioners from encoding structural prior knowledge. We fill this gap by adopting regularizers that promote structured sparsity, along with efficient algorithms to handle them. Experiments on three tasks (chunking, entity recognition, and dependency parsing) show gains in performance, compactness, and model interpretability. 1

Users want natural language processing (NLP) systems to be both fast and accurate, but quality often comes at the cost of speed. The field has been manually exploring various speed-accuracy tradeoffs for particular problems or datasets. We aim to explore this space automatically, focusing here on the case of agenda-based syntactic parsing (Kay, 1986). Unfortunately, offthe-shelf reinforcement learning techniques fail to learn good policies: the state space is too large to explore naively. We propose a hybrid reinforcement/apprenticeship learning algorithm that, even with few inexpensive features, can automatically learn weights that achieve competitive accuracies at significant improvements in speed over state-of-the-art baselines. 1.

PCFGs can grow exponentially as additional annotations are added to an initially simple base grammar. We present an approach where multiple annotations coexist, but in a factored manner that avoids this combinatorial explosion. Our method works with linguisticallymotivated annotations, induced latent structure, lexicalization, or any mix of the three. We use a structured expectation propagation algorithm that makes use of the factored structure in two ways. First, by partitioning the factors, it speeds up parsing exponentially over the unfactored approach. Second, it minimizes the redundancy of the factors during training, improving accuracy over an independent approach. Using purely latent variable annotations, we can efficiently train and parse with up to 8 latent bits per symbol, achieving F1 scores up to 88.4 on the Penn Treebank while using two orders of magnitudes fewer parameters compared to the naïve approach. Combining latent, lexicalized, and unlexicalized annotations, our best parser gets 89.4 F1 on all sentences from section 23 of the Penn Treebank. 1