Evaluating a Deterministic Shift-Reduce Neural Parser for Constituent Parsing

LREC 2016 · Hao Zhou, Yue Zhang, Shu-Jian Huang, Xin-yu Dai, Jia-Jun Chen ·

Greedy transition-based parsers are appealing for their very fast speed, with reasonably high accuracies. In this paper, we build a fast shift-reduce neural constituent parser by using a neural network to make local decisions. One challenge to the parsing speed is the large hidden and output layer sizes caused by the number of constituent labels and branching options. We speed up the parser by using a hierarchical output layer, inspired by the hierarchical log-bilinear neural language model. In standard WSJ experiments, the neural parser achieves an almost 2.4 time speed up (320 sen/sec) compared to a non-hierarchical baseline without significant accuracy loss (89.06 vs 89.13 F-score).