# Left-to-Right Dependency Parsing with Pointer Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.08445 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08445/

## Key facts

- Cited by 21 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 20 Mar 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [KLUE: Korean Language Understanding Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09680/) (2021)
- [Bottom-Up Constituency Parsing and Nested Named Entity Recognition with Pointer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05419/) (2021)
- [Dependency Parsing as MRC-based Span-Span Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07654/) (2021)
- [Headed-Span-Based Projective Dependency Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.04750/) (2021)
- [A Modest Pareto Optimisation Analysis of Dependency Parsers in 2021](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04216/) (2021)
- [A Conditional Splitting Framework for Efficient Constituency Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15760/) (2021)
- [Not All Linearizations Are Equally Data-Hungry in Sequence Labeling Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07556/) (2021)
- [Reducing Discontinuous to Continuous Parsing with Pointer Network Reordering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06239/) (2021)
- [Dependency Parsing with Bottom-up Hierarchical Pointer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09611/) (2021)
- [On the Capabilities of Pointer Networks for Deep Deductive Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09225/) (2021)
- [Transition-based Semantic Role Labeling with Pointer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10023/) (2022)
- [Generating CCG Categories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08139/) (2021)
- [Modeling Label Correlations for Second-Order Semantic Dependency Parsing with Mean-Field Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03619/) (2022)
- [Algorithms for Weighted Pushdown Automata](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06884/) (2022)
- [Structured Sentiment Analysis as Transition-based Dependency Graph Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05311/) (2023)
- [Automatic Correction of Syntactic Dependency Annotation Differences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05891/) (2022)
- [The Fragility of Multi-Treebank Parsing Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06699/) (2022)
- [Another Dead End for Morphological Tags? Perturbed Inputs and Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15119/) (2023)
- [A Semi-Autoregressive Graph Generative Model for Dependency Graph Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.12018/) (2023)
- [Thai Universal Dependency Treebank](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07586/) (2024)
- [Formal Constraints on Dependency Syntax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04542/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose a novel transition-based algorithm that straightforwardly parses sentences from left to right by building n attachments, with n being the length of the input sentence. Similarly to the recent stack-pointer parser by Ma et al. (2018), we use the pointer network framework that, given a word, can directly point to a position from the sentence. However, our left-to-right approach is simpler than the original top-down stack-pointer parser (not requiring a stack) and reduces transition sequence length in half, from 2n-1 actions to n. This results in a quadratic non-projective parser that runs twice as fast as the original while achieving the best accuracy to date on the English PTB dataset (96.04% UAS, 94.43% LAS) among fully-supervised single-model dependency parsers, and improves over the former top-down transition system in the majority of languages tested.