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Artificially Evolved Chunks for Morphosyntactic Analysis (arxiv.org)
2 points by sel1 on Aug 13, 2019 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A trial-and-error search inspired by natural evolution automatically finds useful word groups in grammar-annotated text, needing no language-specific rules. Feeding these groups to word-tagging and sentence-structure tasks made them more accurate than running those tasks without them, in English and several other languages.

Abstract

We introduce a language-agnostic evolutionary technique for automatically extracting chunks from dependency treebanks. We evaluate these chunks on a number of morphosyntactic tasks, namely POS tagging, morphological feature tagging, and dependency parsing. We test the utility of these chunks in a host of different ways. We first learn chunking as one task in a shared multi-task framework together with POS and morphological feature tagging. The predictions from this network are then used as input to augment sequence-labelling dependency parsing. Finally, we investigate the impact chunks have on dependency parsing in a multi-task framework. Our results from these analyses show that these chunks improve performance at different levels of syntactic abstraction on English UD treebanks and a small, diverse subset of non-English UD treebanks.

Mark Anderson, David Vilares, Carlos Gómez-Rodríguez
arXiv:1908.03480 · cs.CL · submitted Aug 9, 2019 · updated Aug 21, 2019
abstract · pdf · html · To be published in proceedings of the 18th International Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories

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