Conventional graph-based dependency parsers guarantee a tree structure both during training and inference. Instead, we formalize dependency parsing as the problem of independently selecting the head of each word in a sentence. Our model which we call (as shorthand for De pendency N eural Se lection) produces a distribution over possible heads for each word using features obtained from a bidirectional recurrent neural network. Without enforcing structural constraints during training, generates (at inference time) trees for the overwhelming majority of sentences, while non-tree outputs can be adjusted with a maximum spanning tree algorithm. We evaluate on four languages (English, Chinese, Czech, and German) with varying degrees of non-projectivity. Despite the simplicity of the approach, our parsers are on par with the state of the art.
 We introduce a framework for syntactic parsing with latent variables based on a form of dynamic Sigmoid Belief Networks called Incremental Sigmoid Belief Networks. We demonstrate that a previous feed-forward neural network parsing model can be viewed as a coarse approximation to inference with this class of graphical model. By constructing a more accurate but still tractable approximation, we significantly improve parsing accuracy, suggesting that ISBNs provide a good idealization for parsing. This generative model of parsing achieves state-of-theart results on WSJ text and 8 error reduction over the baseline neural network parser. Discriminative methods have shown significant improvements over traditional generative methods in many machine learning applications, but there has been difficulty in extending them to natural language parsing. One problem is that much of the work on discriminative methods conflates changes to the learning method with changes to the parameterization of the problem. We show how a parser can be trained with a discriminative learning method while still parameterizing the problem according to a generative probability model. We present three methods for training a neural network to estimate the probabilities for a statistical parser, one generative, one discriminative, and one where the probability model is generative but the training criteria is discriminative. The latter model outperforms the previous two, achieving state-of-the-art levels of performance (90.1 F-measure on constituents).