Improved Parsing for Argument-Clusters Coordination

Abstract

Syntactic parsers perform poorly in prediction of Argument-Cluster Coordination (ACC). We change the PTB representation of ACC to be more suitable for learning by a statistical PCFG parser, affecting 125 trees in the training set. Training on the modified trees yields a slight improvement in EVALB scores on sections 22 and 23. The main evaluation is on a corpus of 4th grade science exams, in which ACC structures are prevalent. On this corpus, we obtain an impressive x2.7 improvement in recovering ACC structures compared to a parser trained on the original PTB trees.