Fast full parsing by linear-chain conditional random fields

This paper presents a chunking-based discriminative approach to full parsing. We convert the task of full parsing into a series of chunking tasks and apply a conditional random field (CRF) model to each level of chunking. The probability of an entire parse tree is computed as the product of the probabilities of individual chunking results. The parsing is performed in a bottom-up manner and the best derivation is efficiently obtained by using a depth-first search algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate that this simple parsing framework produces a fast and reasonably accurate parser. © 2009 Association for Computational Linguistics.