Constituent Parsing as Sequence Labeling

Carlos Gómez-Rodríguez, David Vilares


Abstract
We introduce a method to reduce constituent parsing to sequence labeling. For each word wt, it generates a label that encodes: (1) the number of ancestors in the tree that the words wt and wt+1 have in common, and (2) the nonterminal symbol at the lowest common ancestor. We first prove that the proposed encoding function is injective for any tree without unary branches. In practice, the approach is made extensible to all constituency trees by collapsing unary branches. We then use the PTB and CTB treebanks as testbeds and propose a set of fast baselines. We achieve 90% F-score on the PTB test set, outperforming the Vinyals et al. (2015) sequence-to-sequence parser. In addition, sacrificing some accuracy, our approach achieves the fastest constituent parsing speeds reported to date on PTB by a wide margin.
Anthology ID:
D18-1162
Original:
D18-1162v1
Version 2:
D18-1162v2
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October-November
Year:
2018
Address:
Brussels, Belgium
Editors:
Ellen Riloff, David Chiang, Julia Hockenmaier, Jun’ichi Tsujii
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1314–1324
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D18-1162
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D18-1162
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Carlos Gómez-Rodríguez and David Vilares. 2018. Constituent Parsing as Sequence Labeling. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1314–1324, Brussels, Belgium. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Constituent Parsing as Sequence Labeling (Gómez-Rodríguez & Vilares, EMNLP 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D18-1162.pdf
Attachment:
 D18-1162.Attachment.pdf
Video:
 https://vimeo.com/305216237
Code
 aghie/tree2labels