Dependency Parsing as Head Selection

Conventional graph-based dependency parsers guarantee a tree structure both during training and inference. Instead, we formalize dependency parsing as the problem of independently selecting the head of each word in a sentence. Our model which we call textscDeNSe (as shorthand for bf Dependency bf Neural bf Selection) produces a distribution over possible heads for each word using features obtained from a bidirectional recurrent neural network. Without enforcing structural constraints during training, textscDeNSe generates (at inference time) trees for the overwhelming majority of sentences, while non-tree outputs can be adjusted with a maximum spanning tree algorithm. We evaluate textscDeNSe on four languages (English, Chinese, Czech, and German) with varying degrees of non-projectivity. Despite the simplicity of the approach, our parsers are on par with the state of the art.