Minimalist Grammar Transition-Based Parsing

Current chart-based parsers of Minimalist Grammars exhibit prohibitively high polynomial complexity that makes them unusable in practice. This paper presents a transition-based parser for Minimalist Grammars that approximately searches through the space of possible derivations by means of beam search, and does so very efficiently: the worst case complexity of building one derivation is O(n) and the best case complexity is O(n). This approximated inference can be guided by a trained probabilistic model that can condition on larger context than standard chart-based parsers. The transitions of the parser are very similar to the transitions of bottom-up shift-reduce parsers for ContextFree Grammars, with additional transitions for online reordering of words during parsing in order to make non-projective derivations projective.