An Empirical Examination of Challenges in Chinese Parsing

Aspects of Chinese syntax result in a distinctive mix of parsing challenges. However, the contribution of individual sources of error to overall difficulty is not well understood. We conduct a comprehensive automatic analysis of error types made by Chinese parsers, covering a broad range of error types for large sets of sentences, enabling the first empirical ranking of Chinese error types by their performance impact. We also investigate which error types are resolved by using gold part-of-speech tags, showing that improving Chinese tagging only addresses certain error types, leaving substantial outstanding challenges.