Grammar-driven versus data-driven: which parsing system is more affected by domain shifts?

  • Authors:
  • Barbara Plank;Gertjan van Noord

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

  • Venue:
  • NLPLING '10 Proceedings of the 2010 Workshop on NLP and Linguistics: Finding the Common Ground
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

In the past decade several parsing systems for natural language have emerged, which use different methods and formalisms. For instance, systems that employ a handcrafted grammar and a statistical disambiguation component versus purely statistical data-driven systems. What they have in common is the lack of portability to new domains: their performance might decrease substantially as the distance between test and training domain increases. Yet, to which degree do they suffer from this problem, i.e. which kind of parsing system is more affected by domain shifts? Intuitively, grammar-driven systems should be less affected by domain changes. To investigate this hypothesis, an empirical investigation on Dutch is carried out. The performance variation of a grammar-driven versus two data-driven systems across domains is evaluated, and a simple measure to quantify domain sensitivity proposed. This will give an estimate of which parsing system is more affected by domain shifts, and thus more in need for adaptation techniques.