A non-DNN Feature Engineering Approach to Dependency Parsing - FBAML at CoNLL 2017 Shared Task

For this year’s multilingual dependency parsing shared task, we developed a pipeline system, which uses a variety of features for each of its components. Unlike the recent popular deep learning approaches that learn low dimensional dense features using non-linear classifier, our system uses structured linear classifiers to learn millions of sparse features. Specifically, we trained a linear classifier for sentence boundary prediction, linear chain conditional random fields (CRFs) for tokenization, part-of-speech tagging and morph analysis. A second order graph based parser learns the tree structure (without relations), and a linear tree CRF then assigns relations to the dependencies in the tree. Our system achieves reasonable performance – 67.87% official averaged macro F1 score.