Neural Scoring Function for MST Parser

Continuous word representations appeared to be a useful feature in many natural language processing tasks. Using fixed-dimension pre-trained word embeddings allows avoiding sparse bag-of-words representation and to train models with fewer parameters. In this paper, we use fixed pre-trained word embeddings as additional features for a neural scoring function in the MST parser. With the multi-layer architecture of the scoring function we can avoid handcrafting feature conjunctions. The continuous word representations on the input also allow us to reduce the number of lexical features, make the parser more robust to out-of-vocabulary words, and reduce the total number of parameters of the model. Although its accuracy stays below the state of the art, the model size is substantially smaller than with the standard features set. Moreover, it performs well for languages where only a smaller treebank is available and the results promise to be useful in cross-lingual parsing.