An alternative to head-driven approaches for parsing a (relatively) free word-order language

  • Authors:
  • Reut Tsarfaty;Khalil Sima'an;Remko Scha

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Amsterdam;University of Amsterdam;University of Amsterdam

  • Venue:
  • EMNLP '09 Proceedings of the 2009 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Volume 2 - Volume 2
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Applying statistical parsers developed for English to languages with freer word-order has turned out to be harder than expected. This paper investigates the adequacy of different statistical parsing models for dealing with a (relatively) free word-order language. We show that the recently proposed Relational-Realizational (RR) model consistently outperforms state-of-the-art Head-Driven (HD) models on the Hebrew Treebank. Our analysis reveals a weakness of HD models: their intrinsic focus on configurational information. We conclude that the form-function separation ingrained in RR models makes them better suited for parsing nonconfigurational phenomena.