Neutralizing linguistically problematic annotations in unsupervised dependency parsing evaluation

Roy Schwartz*, Omri Abend, Roi Reichart, Ari Rappoport

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

30 Scopus citations

Abstract

Dependency parsing is a central NLP task. In this paper we show that the common evaluation for unsupervised dependency parsing is highly sensitive to problematic annotations. We show that for three leading unsupervised parsers (Klein and Manning, 2004; Cohen and Smith, 2009; Spitkovsky et al., 2010a), a small set of parameters can be found whose modification yields a significant improvement in standard evaluation measures. These parameters correspond to local cases where no linguistic consensus exists as to the proper gold annotation. Therefore, the standard evaluation does not provide a true indication of algorithm quality. We present a new measure, Neutral Edge Direction (NED), and show that it greatly reduces this undesired phenomenon.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationACL-HLT 2011 - Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Subtitle of host publicationHuman Language Technologies
Pages663-672
Number of pages10
StatePublished - 2011
Event49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, ACL-HLT 2011 - Portland, OR, United States
Duration: 19 Jun 201124 Jun 2011

Publication series

NameACL-HLT 2011 - Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Volume1

Conference

Conference49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, ACL-HLT 2011
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityPortland, OR
Period19/06/1124/06/11

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