  Discontinuous constituent parsers have always lagged behind continuous
approaches in terms of accuracy and speed, as the presence of constituents with
discontinuous yield introduces extra complexity to the task. However, a
discontinuous tree can be converted into a continuous variant by reordering
tokens. Based on that, we propose to reduce discontinuous parsing to a
continuous problem, which can then be directly solved by any off-the-shelf
continuous parser. To that end, we develop a Pointer Network capable of
accurately generating the continuous token arrangement for a given input
sentence and define a bijective function to recover the original order.
Experiments on the main benchmarks with two continuous parsers prove that our
approach is on par in accuracy with purely discontinuous state-of-the-art
algorithms, but considerably faster.
