A Comparison of Chinese Parsers for Stanford Dependencies

Stanford dependencies are widely used in natural language processing as a semanticallyoriented representation, commonly generated either by (i) converting the output of a constituent parser, or (ii) predicting dependencies directly. Previous comparisons of the two approaches for English suggest that starting from constituents yields higher accuracies. In this paper, we re-evaluate both methods for Chinese, using more accurate dependency parsers than in previous work. Our comparison of performance and efficiency across seven popular open source parsers (four constituent and three dependency) shows, by contrast, that recent higher-order graph-based techniques can be more accurate, though somewhat slower, than constituent parsers. We demonstrate also that n-way jackknifing is a useful technique for producing automatic (rather than gold) partof-speech tags to train Chinese dependency parsers. Finally, we analyze the relations produced by both kinds of parsing and suggest which specific parsers to use in practice.