Unified dependency parsing of Chinese morphological and syntactic structures

  • Authors:
  • Zhongguo Li;Guodong Zhou

  • Affiliations:
  • Soochow University, Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, China;Soochow University, Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, China

  • Venue:
  • EMNLP-CoNLL '12 Proceedings of the 2012 Joint Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Most previous approaches to syntactic parsing of Chinese rely on a preprocessing step of word segmentation, thereby assuming there was a clearly defined boundary between morphology and syntax in Chinese. We show how this assumption can fail badly, leading to many out-of-vocabulary words and incompatible annotations. Hence in practice the strict separation of morphology and syntax in the Chinese language proves to be untenable. We present a unified dependency parsing approach for Chinese which takes unsegmented sentences as input and outputs both morphological and syntactic structures with a single model and algorithm. By removing the intermediate word segmentation, the unified parser no longer needs separate notions for words and phrases. Evaluation proves the effectiveness of the unified model and algorithm in parsing structures of words, phrases and sentences simultaneously.