Using Decision Trees to Construct a Practical Parser

  • Authors:
  • Masahiko Haruno;Satoshi Shirai;Yoshifumi Ooyama

  • Affiliations:
  • ATR Human Information Processing Research Laboratories, 2-2 Hikaridai, Seika-cho, Soraku-gun, Kyoto 619-02, Japan. mharuno@hip.atr.co.jp;NTT Communication Science Laboratories, 2-4 Hikaridai, Seika-cho, Soraku-gun, Kyoto 619-02, Japan. shirai@cslab.kecl.ntt.co.jp;NTT Communication Science Laboratories, 2-4 Hikaridai, Seika-cho, Soraku-gun, Kyoto 619-02, Japan. ooyama@cslab.kecl.ntt.co.jp

  • Venue:
  • Machine Learning - Special issue on natural language learning
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

This paper describes a novel and practical Japaneseparser that uses decision trees. First, we construct a single decision treeto estimate modification probabilities; how one phrase tends tomodify another. Next, we introduce a boosting algorithm in whichseveral decision trees are constructed and then combined forprobability estimation. The constructed parsers are evaluated usingthe EDR Japanese annotated corpus. The single-tree methodsignificantly outperforms the conventional Japanese stochasticmethods. Moreover, the boosted version of the parser is shown to have great advantages; (1) a better parsing accuracy than itssingle-tree counterpart for any amount of training data and (2) noover-fitting to data for various iterations. The presented parser,the first non-English stochastic parser with practical performance,should tighten the coupling between natural language processing andmachine learning.