An Attempt to Develop a Neural Parser based on Simplified Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar on Vietnamese

In this paper, we aimed to develop a neural parser for Vietnamese based on simplified Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). The existing corpora, VietTreebank and VnDT, had around 15% of constituency and dependency tree pairs that did not adhere to simplified HPSG rules. To attempt to address the issue of the corpora not adhering to simplified HPSG rules, we randomly permuted samples from the training and development sets to make them compliant with simplified HPSG. We then modified the first simplified HPSG Neural Parser for the Penn Treebank by replacing it with the PhoBERT or XLM-RoBERTa models, which can encode Vietnamese texts. We conducted experiments on our modified VietTreebank and VnDT corpora. Our extensive experiments showed that the simplified HPSG Neural Parser achieved a new state-of-the-art F-score of 82% for constituency parsing when using the same predicted part-of-speech (POS) tags as the self-attentive constituency parser. Additionally, it outperformed previous studies in dependency parsing with a higher Unlabeled Attachment Score (UAS). However, our parser obtained lower Labeled Attachment Score (LAS) scores likely due to our focus on arc permutation without changing the original labels, as we did not consult with a linguistic expert. Lastly, the research findings of this paper suggest that simplified HPSG should be given more attention to linguistic expert when developing treebanks for Vietnamese natural language processing.