Abstract
pcfg Learning by Partition Search is a general grammatical inference method for constructing, adapting and optimising pcfgs. Given a training corpus of examples from a language, a canonical grammar for the training corpus, and a parsing task, Partition Search pcfg Learning constructs a grammar that maximises performance on the parsing task and minimises grammar size. This paper describes Partition Search in detail, also providing theoretical background and a characterisation of the family of inference methods it belongs to. The paper also reports an example application to the task of building grammars for noun phrase extraction, a task that is crucial in many applications involving natural language processing. In the experiments, Partition Search improves parsing performance by up to 21.45% compared to a general baseline and by up to 3.48% compared to a task-specific baseline, while reducing grammar size by up to 17.25%.
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Belz, A. (2002). PCFG Learning by Nonterminal Partition Search. In: Adriaans, P., Fernau, H., van Zaanen, M. (eds) Grammatical Inference: Algorithms and Applications. ICGI 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 2484. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45790-9_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45790-9_2
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