Self-training PCFG grammars with latent annotations across languages

Abstract

We investigate the effectiveness of self-training PCFG grammars with latent annotations (PCFG-LA) for parsing languages with different amounts of labeled training data. Compared to Charniak's lexicalized parser, the PCFG-LA parser was more effectively adapted to a language for which parsing has been less well developed (i.e., Chinese) and benefited more from self-training. We show for the first time that self-training is able to significantly improve the performance of the PCFG-LA parser, a single generative parser, on both small and large amounts of labeled training data. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art parsing accuracies for a single parser on both English (91.5%) and Chinese (85.2%).