A neural probabilistic structured-prediction method for transition-based natural language processing

Abstract

We propose a neural probabilistic structured-prediction method for transition-based natural language processing, which integrates beam search and contrastive learning. The method uses a global optimization model, which can leverage arbitrary features over nonlocal context. Beam search is used for efficient heuristic decoding, and contrastive learning is performed for adjusting the model according to search errors. When evaluated on both chunking and dependency parsing tasks, the proposed method achieves significant accuracy improvements over the locally normalized greedy baseline on the two tasks, respectively.