Best Paper Award of EACL 2012

In this paper we study spectral learning methods for non-deterministic split head-automata grammars, a powerful hidden-state formalism for dependency parsing. We present a learning algorithm that, like other spectral methods, is efficient and non-susceptible to local minima. We show how this algorithm can be formulated as a technique for inducing hidden structure from distributions computed by forward-backward recursions. Furthermore, we also present an inside-outside algorithm for the parsing model that runs in cubic time, hence maintaining the standard parsing costs for context-free grammars.

Peer Reviewed

Award-winning