A Unifying Theory of Transition-based and Sequence Labeling Parsing

Abstract

We define a mapping from transition-based parsing algorithms that read sentences from left to right to sequence labeling encodings of syntactic trees. This not only establishes a theoretical relation between transition-based parsing and sequence-labeling parsing, but also provides a method to obtain new encodings for fast and simple sequence labeling parsing from the many existing transition-based parsers for different formalisms. Applying it to dependency parsing, we implement sequence labeling versions of four algorithms, showing that they are learnable and obtain comparable performance to existing encodings.