Parsing accuracy using efficient greedy transition systems has improved dramatically in recent years thanks to neural networks. Despite striking results in dependency parsing, however, neural models have not surpassed state-of-the-art approaches in constituency parsing. To remedy this, we introduce a new shift-reduce system whose stack contains merely sentence spans, represented by a bare minimum of LSTM features. We also design the first provably optimal dynamic oracle for constituency parsing, which runs in amortized O(1) time, compared to O(n^3) oracles for standard dependency parsing. Training with this oracle, we achieve the best F1 scores on both English and French of any parser that does not use reranking or external data.
Recently, neural network approaches for parsing have largely automated the combination of individual features, but still rely on (often a larger number of) atomic features created from human linguistic intuition, and potentially omitting important global context. To further reduce feature engineering to the bare minimum, we use bi-directional LSTM sentence representations to model a parser state with only three sentence positions, which automatically identifies important aspects of the entire sentence. This model achieves state-of-the-art results among greedy dependency parsers for English. We also introduce a novel transition system for constituency parsing which does not require binarization, and together with the above architecture, achieves state-of-the-art results among greedy parsers for both English and Chinese.
In sentence modeling and classification, convolutional neural network approaches have recently achieved state-of-the-art results, but all such efforts process word vectors sequentially and neglect long-distance dependencies. To exploit both deep learning and linguistic structures, we propose a tree-based convolutional neural network model which exploit various long-distance relationships between words. Our model improves the sequential baselines on all three sentiment and question classification tasks, and achieves the highest published accuracy on TREC.
Semantic parsing has made significant progress, but most current semantic parsers are extremely slow (CKY-based) and rather primitive in representation. We introduce three new techniques to tackle these problems. First, we design the first linear-time incremental shift-reduce-style semantic parsing algorithm which is more efficient than conventional cubic-time bottom-up semantic parsers. Second, our parser, being type-driven instead of syntax-driven, uses type-checking to decide the direction of reduction, which eliminates the need for a syntactic grammar such as CCG. Third, to fully exploit the power of type-driven semantic parsing beyond simple types (such as entities and truth values), we borrow from programming language theory the concepts of subtype polymorphism and parametric polymorphism to enrich the type system in order to better guide the parsing. Our system learns very accurate parses in GeoQuery, Jobs and Atis domains.