Unsupervised methods for head assignments

  • Authors:
  • Federico Sangati;Willem Zuidema

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands;University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

  • Venue:
  • EACL '09 Proceedings of the 12th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

We present several algorithms for assigning heads in phrase structure trees, based on different linguistic intuitions on the role of heads in natural language syntax. Starting point of our approach is the observation that a head-annotated treebank defines a unique lexicalized tree substitution grammar. This allows us to go back and forth between the two representations, and define objective functions for the unsupervised learning of head assignments in terms of features of the implicit lexicalized tree grammars. We evaluate algorithms based on the match with gold standard head-annotations, and the comparative parsing accuracy of the lexicalized grammars they give rise to. On the first task, we approach the accuracy of hand-designed heuristics for English and inter-annotation-standard agreement for German. On the second task, the implied lexicalized grammars score 4% points higher on parsing accuracy than lexicalized grammars derived by commonly used heuristics.