Both bottom-up and top-down strategies have been used for neural transition-based constituent parsing. The parsing strategies differ in terms of the order in which they recognize productions in the derivation tree, where bottom-up strategies and top-down strategies take post-order and pre-order traversal over trees, respectively. Bottom-up parsers benefit from rich features from readily built partial parses, but lack lookahead guidance in the parsing process; top-down parsers benefit from non-local guidance for local decisions, but rely on a strong encoder over the input to predict a constituent hierarchy before its construction.To mitigate both issues, we propose a novel parsing system based on in-order traversal over syntactic trees, designing a set of transition actions to find a compromise between bottom-up constituent information and top-down lookahead information. Based on stack-LSTM, our psycholinguistically motivated constituent parsing system achieves 91.8 F1 on WSJ benchmark. Furthermore, the system achieves 93.6 F1 with supervised reranking and 94.2 F1 with semi-supervised reranking, which are the best results on the WSJ benchmark.
We develop a novel bi-directional attention model for dependency parsing, which learns to agree on headword predictions from the forward and backward parsing directions. The parsing procedure for each direction is formulated as sequentially querying the memory component that stores continuous headword embeddings. The proposed parser makes use of soft headword embeddings, allowing the model to implicitly capture high-order parsing history without dramatically increasing the computational complexity. We conduct experiments on English, Chinese, and 12 other languages from the CoNLL 2006 shared task, showing that the proposed model achieves state-of-the-art unlabeled attachment scores on 6 languages. We introduce recurrent neural network grammars, probabilistic models of sentences with explicit phrase structure. We explain efficient inference procedures that allow application to both parsing and language modeling. Experiments show that they provide better parsing in English than any single previously published supervised generative model and better language modeling than state-of-the-art sequential RNNs in English and Chinese.  Recurrent neural network grammars (RNNG) are a recently proposed probabilistic generative modeling family for natural language. They show state-of-the-art language modeling and parsing performance. We investigate what information they learn, from a linguistic perspective, through various ablations to the model and the data, and by augmenting the model with an attention mechanism (GA-RNNG) to enable closer inspection. We find that explicit modeling of composition is crucial for achieving the best performance. Through the attention mechanism, we find that headedness plays a central role in phrasal representation (with the model's latent attention largely agreeing with predictions made by hand-crafted head rules, albeit with some important differences). By training grammars without nonterminal labels, we find that phrasal representations depend minimally on nonterminals, providing support for the endocentricity hypothesis. Almost all current dependency parsers classify based on millions of sparse indicator features. Not only do these features generalize poorly, but the cost of feature computation restricts parsing speed significantly. In this work, we propose a novel way of learning a neural network classifier for use in a greedy, transition-based dependency parser. Because this classifier learns and uses just a small number of dense features, it can work very fast, while achieving an about 2 improvement in unlabeled and labeled attachment scores on both English and Chinese datasets. Concretely, our parser is able to parse more than 1000 sentences per second at 92.2 unlabeled attachment score on the English Penn Treebank.  We propose three improvements to address the drawbacks of state-of-the-art transition-based constituent parsers. First, to resolve the error propagation problem of the traditional pipeline approach, we incorporate POS tagging into the syntactic parsing process. Second, to alleviate the negative influence of size differences among competing action sequences, we align parser states during beam-search decoding. Third, to enhance the power of parsing models, we enlarge the feature set with non-local features and semisupervised word cluster features. Experimental results show that these modifications improve parsing performance significantly. Evaluated on the Chinese TreeBank (CTB), our final performance reaches 86.3 (F1) when trained on CTB 5.1, and 87.1 when trained on CTB 6.0, and these results outperform all state-of-the-art parsers.