Bagging and Boosting a Treebank Parser

Abstract

Bagging and boosting, two effective machine learning techniques, are applied to natural language parsing. Experiments using these techniques with a trainable statistical parser are described. The best resulting system provides roughly as large of a gain in F-measure as doubling the corpus size. Error analysis of the result of the boosting technique reveals some inconsistent annotations in the Penn Treebank, suggesting a semi-automatic method for finding inconsistent treebank annotations.