Weakly supervised parsing with rules

This work proposes a new research direction to address the lack of structures in traditional n-gram models. It is based on a weakly supervised dependency parser that can model speech syntax without relying on any annotated training corpus. Labeled data is replaced by a few hand-crafted rules that encode basic syntactic knowledge. Bayesian inference then samples the rules, disambiguating and combining them to create complex tree structures that maximize a discriminative model’s posterior on a target unlabeled corpus. This posterior encodes sparse selectional preferences between a head word and its dependents. The model is evaluated on English and Czech newspaper texts, and is then validated on French broadcast news transcriptions.