Minimal Span-Based Neural Constituency Parser

This is a reference Python implementation of the top-down and chart-based constituency parsers described in A Minimal Span-Based Neural Constituency Parser from ACL 2017.

The top-down parser is implemented as described in the paper.

The chart parser includes the simplifications outlined in the ACL 2017 oral presentation, namely:

• Removing the unlabeled span-scoring terms from the model.
• Fixing the score of the empty label at 0.

These changes improve speed and reduce memory usage without affecting final performance. Moreover, they result in the score of a tree decomposing directly into a sum of labeled span scores, eliminating score differences that arise due to different choices of binarization.

Requirements and Setup

• Python 3.5 or higher.
• DyNet. We recommend installing DyNet from source with MKL support for significantly faster run time.
• EVALB. Before starting, run make inside the EVALB/ directory to compile an evalb executable. This will be called from Python for evaluation.
• Pre-trained models. Before starting, run unzip zipped/top-down-model_dev=92.34.zip and unzip zipped/chart-model_dev=92.24.zip in the models/ directory to extract the pre-trained models.

Training

A new model can be trained using the command python3 src/main.py train ... with the following arguments:

*These arguments only apply to the top-down parser.

Any of the DyNet command line options can also be specified.

The training and development trees are assumed to have predicted part-of-speech tags.

For each development evaluation, the F-score on the development set is computed and compared to the previous best. If the current model is better, the previous model will be deleted and the current model will be saved. The new filename will be derived from the provided model path base and the development F-score.

As an example, to train a top-down parser with exploration using the default hyperparameters, you can use the command:

python3 src/main.py train --parser-type top-down --explore --model-path-base models/top-down-model

Alternatively, to train a chart parser using the default hyperparameters, you can use the command:

python3 src/main.py train --parser-type chart --model-path-base models/chart-model

Compressed pre-trained models with these settings are provided in the models/zipped/ directory. See the section above for extraction instructions.

Evaluation

A saved model can be evaluated on a test corpus using the command python3 src/main.py test ... with the following arguments:

As above, any of the DyNet command line options can also be specified.

The test trees are assumed to have predicted part-of-speech tags.

As an example, after extracting the pre-trained top-down model, you can evaluate it on the test set using the following command:

python3 src/main.py test --model-path-base models/top-down-model_dev=92.34

The pre-trained top-down model obtains F-scores of 92.34 on the development set and 91.80 on the test set. The pre-trained chart model obtains F-scores of 92.24 on the development set and 91.86 on the test set.

Parsing New Sentences

The parse method of a parser can be used to parse new sentences. In particular, parser.parse(sentence) will return a tuple containing the predicted tree and a DyNet expression for the score of the tree under the model. The input sentence should be pre-tagged and represented as a list of (tag, word) pairs.

See the run_test function in src/main.py for an example of how a parser can be loaded from disk and used to parse sentences.

Citation

If you use this software for research, please cite our paper as follows:

@InProceedings{Stern2017Minimal,
  author    = {Stern, Mitchell and Andreas, Jacob and Klein, Dan},
  title     = {A Minimal Span-Based Neural Constituency Parser},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)},
  month     = {July},
  year      = {2017},
  address   = {Vancouver, Canada},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  pages     = {818--827},
  url       = {http://aclweb.org/anthology/P17-1076}
}