Incremental Joint POS Tagging and Dependency Parsing in Chinese

We address the problem of joint part-of-speech (POS) tagging and dependency parsing in Chinese. In Chinese, some POS tags are often hard to disambiguate without considering longrange syntactic information. Also, the traditional pipeline approach to POS tagging and dependency parsing may suffer from the problem of error propagation. In this paper, we propose the first incremental approach to the task of joint POS tagging and dependency parsing, which is built upon a shift-reduce parsing framework with dynamic programming. Although the incremental approach encounters difficulties with underspecified POS tags of look-ahead words, we overcome this issue by introducing so-called delayed features. Our joint approach achieved substantial improvements over the pipeline and baseline systems in both POS tagging and dependency parsing task, achieving the new state-of-the-art performance on this joint task.