Character-Level Chinese Dependency Parsing

Meishan Zhang, Yue Zhang, Wanxiang Che, Ting Liu

Abstract: Recent work on Chinese analysis has led to large-scale annotations of the internal structures of words, enabling characterlevel analysis of Chinese syntactic structures. In this paper, we investigate the problem of character-level Chinese dependency parsing, building dependency trees over characters. Character-level information can benefit downstream applications by offering flexible granularities for word segmentation while improving wordlevel dependency parsing accuracies. We present novel adaptations of two major shift-reduce dependency parsing algorithms to character-level parsing. Experimental results on the Chinese Treebank demonstrate improved performances over word-based parsing methods.