On the Role of Supervision in Unsupervised Constituency Parsing

Haoyue Shi, Karen Livescu, Kevin Gimpel


Abstract
We analyze several recent unsupervised constituency parsing models, which are tuned with respect to the parsing F1 score on the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) development set (1,700 sentences). We introduce strong baselines for them, by training an existing supervised parsing model (Kitaev and Klein, 2018) on the same labeled examples they access. When training on the 1,700 examples, or even when using only 50 examples for training and 5 for development, such a few-shot parsing approach can outperform all the unsupervised parsing methods by a significant margin. Few-shot parsing can be further improved by a simple data augmentation method and self-training. This suggests that, in order to arrive at fair conclusions, we should carefully consider the amount of labeled data used for model development. We propose two protocols for future work on unsupervised parsing: (i) use fully unsupervised criteria for hyperparameter tuning and model selection; (ii) use as few labeled examples as possible for model development, and compare to few-shot parsing trained on the same labeled examples.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.614
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7611–7621
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.614
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.614
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Haoyue Shi, Karen Livescu, and Kevin Gimpel. 2020. On the Role of Supervision in Unsupervised Constituency Parsing. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 7611–7621, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
On the Role of Supervision in Unsupervised Constituency Parsing (Shi et al., EMNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.614.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38939171