Language independent dependency to constituent tree conversion

Abstract

We present a dependency to constituent tree conversion technique that aims to improve constituent parsing accuracies by leveraging dependency treebanks available in a wide variety in many languages. The technique works in two steps. First, a partial constituent tree is derived from a dependency tree with a very simple deterministic algorithm that is both language and dependency type independent. Second, a complete high accuracy constituent tree is derived with a constraint-based parser, which uses the partial constituent tree as external constraints. Evaluated on Section 22 of the WSJ Treebank, the technique achieves the state-of-the-art conversion F-score 95.6. When applied to English Universal Dependency treebank and German CoNLL2006 treebank, the converted treebanks added to the human-annotated constituent parser training corpus improve parsing F-scores significantly for both languages.