arXiv subjects

Brian Roark

Publications and source records attributed to Brian Roark.

21 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2000

Measuring efficiency in high-accuracy, broad-coverage statistical parsing

Very little attention has been paid to the comparison of efficiency between high accuracy statistical parsers. This paper proposes one machine-independent metric that is general enough to allow comparisons across very different parsing architectures. This metric, which we call ``events considered'', measures the number of ``events'', however they are defined for a particular parser, for which a probability must be calculated, in order to find the parse. It is applicable to single-pass or multi-stage parsers. We discuss the advantages of the metric, and demonstrate its usefulness by using it to compare two parsers which differ in several fundamental ways.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2000

Compact non-left-recursive grammars using the selective left-corner transform and factoring

The left-corner transform removes left-recursion from (probabilistic) context-free grammars and unification grammars, permitting simple top-down parsing techniques to be used. Unfortunately the grammars produced by the standard left-corner transform are usually much larger than the original. The selective left-corner transform described in this paper produces a transformed grammar which simulates left-corner recognition of a user-specified set of the original productions, and top-down recognition of the others. Combined with two factorizations, it produces non-left-recursive grammars that are not much larger than the original.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2000

Efficient probabilistic top-down and left-corner parsing

This paper examines efficient predictive broad-coverage parsing without dynamic programming. In contrast to bottom-up methods, depth-first top-down parsing produces partial parses that are fully connected trees spanning the entire left context, from which any kind of non-local dependency or partial semantic interpretation can in principle be read. We contrast two predictive parsing approaches, top-down and left-corner parsing, and find both to be viable. In addition, we find that enhancement with non-local information not only improves parser accuracy, but also substantially improves the search efficiency.

cs.CL↗