Headed-Span-Based Projective Dependency Parsing

We propose a new method for projective dependency parsing based on headed spans. In a projective dependency tree, the largest subtree rooted at each word covers a contiguous sequence (i.e., a span) in the surface order. We call such a span marked by a root word headed span. A projective dependency tree can be represented as a collection of headed spans. We decompose the score of a dependency tree into the scores of the headed spans and design a novel O(n3) dynamic programming algorithm to enable global training and exact inference. Our model achieves state-of-the-art or competitive results on PTB, CTB, and UD1.