Dependency Chart Parsing Algorithm Based on Ternary-Span Combination

Abstract

This paper presents a new span-based dependency chart parsing algorithm that models the relations between the left and right dependents of a head. Such relations cannot be modeled in existing span-based algorithms, despite their popularity in dependency corpora. We address this problem through ternary-span combination during the subtree derivation. By modeling the relations between the left and right dependents of a head, our proposed algorithm provides a better capability of coordination disambiguation when the conjunction is annotated as the head of the left and right conjuncts. This eventually leads to state-of-the-art performance of dependency parsing on the Chinese data of the CoNLL shared task.