DILUCT: An Open-Source Spanish Dependency Parser Based on Rules, Heuristics, and Selectional Preferences

A method for recognizing syntactic patterns for Spanish is presented. This method is based on dependency parsing using heuristic rules to infer dependency relationships between words, and word co-occurrence statistics (learnt in an unsupervised manner) to resolve ambiguities such as prepositional phrase attachment. If a complete parse cannot be produced, a partial structure is built with some (if not all) dependency relations identified. Evaluation shows that in spite of its simplicity, the parser’s accuracy is superior to the available existing parsers for Spanish. Though certain grammar rules, as well as the lexical resources used, are specific for Spanish, the suggested approach is language-independent. * This work was done under partial support of Mexican Government (SNI, CGPI-IPN, COFAA-IPN, and PIFI-IPN). The authors cordially thank Jordi Atserias for providing the data on the comparison of TACAT parser with our system.