Fully Parsing The Penn Treebank


We present a two stage parser that recovers Penn Treebank style syntactic analyses of new sentences including skeletal syntactic structure, and, for the first time, both function tags and empty categories. The accuracy of the first-stage parser on the standard Parseval metric matches that of the ( Collins, 2003 ) parser on which it is based, despite the data fragmentation caused by the greatly enriched space of possible node labels. This first stage simultaneously achieves near state-of-the-art performance on recovering function tags with minimal modifications to the underlying parser, modifying less than ten lines of code. The second stage achieves state-of-the-art performance on the recovery of empty categories by combining a linguistically-informed architecture and a rich feature set with the power of modern machine learning methods.