Data-driven, PCFG-based and Pseudo-PCFG-based Models for Chinese Dependency Parsing

We present a comparative study of transition-, graph- and PCFG-based models aimed at illuminating more precisely the likely contribution of CFGs in improving Chinese dependency parsing accuracy, especially by combining heterogeneous models. Inspired by the impact of a constituency grammar on dependency parsing, we propose several strategies to acquire pseudo CFGs only from dependency annotations. Compared to linguistic grammars learned from rich phrase-structure treebanks, well designed pseudo grammars achieve similar parsing accuracy and have equivalent contributions to parser ensemble. Moreover, pseudo grammars increase the diversity of base models; therefore, together with all other models, further improve system combination. Based on automatic POS tagging, our final model achieves a UAS of 87.23%, resulting in a significant improvement of the state of the art.