Effective analysis of causes and inter-dependencies of parsing errors

Abstract

In this paper, we propose two methods for analyzing errors in parsing. One is to classify errors into categories which grammar developers can easily associate with defects in grammar or a parsing model and thus its improvement. The other is to discover inter-dependencies among errors, and thus grammar developers can focus on errors which are crucial for improving the performance of a parsing model. The first method uses patterns of errors to associate them with categories of causes for those errors, such as errors in scope determination of coordination, PP-attachment, identification of antecedent of relative clauses, etc. On the other hand, the second method, which is based on re-parsing with one of observed errors corrected, assesses inter-dependencies among errors by examining which other errors were to be corrected as a result if a specific error was corrected. Experiments show that these two methods are complementary and by being combined, they can provide useful clues as to how to improve a given grammar.