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On Dependency Analysis via Contractions and Weighted FSTs

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Shall We Play the Festschrift Game?

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Abstract

Arc contractions in syntactic dependency graphs can be used to decide which graphs are trees. The paper observes that these contractions can be expressed with weighted finite-state transducers (weighted FST) that operate on string-encoded trees. The observation gives rise to a finite-state parsing algorithm that computes the parse forest and extracts the best parses from it. The algorithm is customizable to functional and bilexical dependency parsing, and it can be extended to non-projective parsing via a multi-planar encoding with prior results on high recall. Our experiments support an analysis of projective parsing according to which the worst-case time complexity of the algorithm is quadratic to the sentence length, and linear to the overlapping arcs and the number of functional categories of the arcs. The results suggest several interesting directions towards efficient and high-precision dependency parsing that takes advantage of the flexibility and the demonstrated ambiguity-packing capacity of such a parser.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    It would be interesting to study how the minorization relation compares with the derivation relation of tree adjoining grammars. In both cases, the derived tree is manipulated from inside.

  2. 2.

    This article is published on the occasion of Professor Lauri Carlson’s birthday. As he co-supervised my Ph.D. research together with Kimmo Koskenniemi a decade ago, it is now a great privilege for me to write about these new advances in the research area where we started together.

  3. 3.

    The tree is drawn with the xdag.sty package written by Denys Duchier, Ralph Debusmann and Robert Grabowski. For convenience, the orientation of the tree is flipped in the context of the linguistic example that is typeset with expex.sty.

  4. 4.

    This definition excludes arc deletion that is normally included in the definition of graph minors.

  5. 5.

    These minorization and “majorization” phases could be compared to the forward and backward procedures used in trellis algorithms for Hidden Markov Models.

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Acknowledgements

The research has been made possible by the Academy of Finland grant number 128536 “Open and Language Independent Automata-Based Resource Production Methods for Common Language Research Infrastructure”, and, more recently, by the FIN-CLARIN project steered by Krister Lindén. Kimmo Koskenniemi, Pasi Tapanainen, Atro Voutilainen and Lauri Carlson supported my first investigations into contractions in finite-state intersection parsing since 1995. More recently, my thinking has benefited from several related discussions with Carlos Gómez-Rodríguez, Jason Eisner, Joakim Nivre, Marco Kuhlmann, and John Hale. During the multi-year creative process, I felt several times need for heavenly empowerment. I look gratefully back to every inspired moment.

I am indebted to the prior anonymous reviewers of the CIAA 2011 and FSMNLP 2011 meetings, as well as Aarne Ranta, Wanjiku Nganga, Jussi Piitulainen, and Miikka Silfverberg for their valuable comments pointing out many areas for further study. The remaining imperfections in the text are mine, of course.

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  1. Department of Modern Languages, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

    Anssi Yli-Jyrä

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  1. Anssi Yli-Jyrä
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  1. Department of Literature, Area Studies and, University of Oslo, Niels Henrik Abels vei 36, Oslo, 0315, Oslo, Norway

    Diana Santos

  2. Department of Modern Languages, University of Helsinki, Unioninkatu 40, Helsinki, 00014, Finland

    Krister Lindén

  3. Informatics, University of Nairobi, School of Computing &, Chiromo Campus RM 105, Nairobi, 00100, Kenya

    Wanjiku Ng’ang’a

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Yli-Jyrä, A. (2012). On Dependency Analysis via Contractions and Weighted FSTs. In: Santos, D., Lindén, K., Ng’ang’a, W. (eds) Shall We Play the Festschrift Game?. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-30773-7_10

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