Dependency Parsing with Efficient Feature Extraction

Abstract

The fastest parsers currently can parse an average sentence in up to 2.5ms, a considerable improvement, since most of the older accuracy-oriented parsers parse only few sentences per second. It is generally accepted that the complexity of a parsing algorithm is decisive for the performance of a parser. However, we show that the most time consuming part of processing is feature extraction and therefore an algorithm which allows efficient feature extraction can outperform a less complex algorithm which does not. Our system based on quadratic Covington’s parsing strategy with efficient feature extraction is able to parse an average English sentence in only 0.8ms without any parallelisation.