On Different Approaches to Syntactic Analysis Into Bi-Lexical Dependencies An Empirical Comparison of Direct, PCFG-Based, and HPSG-Based Parsers

We compare three different approaches to parsing into syntactic, bi-lexical dependencies for English: a ‘direct’ data-driven dependency parser, a statistical phrase structure parser, and a hybrid, ‘deep’ grammar-driven parser. The analyses from the latter two are post-converted to bilexical dependencies. Through this ‘reduction’ of all three approaches to syntactic dependency parsers, we determine empirically what performance can be obtained for a common set of dependency types for English, across a broad variety of domains. In doing so, we observe what trade-offs apply along three dimensions, accuracy, efficiency, and resilience to domain variation. Our results suggest that the hand-built grammar in one of our parsers helps in both accuracy and cross-domain performance.