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University of Cambridge

Structured Learning with Inexact Search: Advances in Shift-Reduce CCG Parsing

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

Statistical shift-reduce parsing involves the interplay of representation learning, structured learning, and inexact search. This dissertation considers approaches that tightly integrate these three elements and explores three novel models for shift-reduce CCG parsing. First, I develop a dependency model, in which the selection of shift-reduce action sequences producing a dependency structure is treated as a hidden variable; the key components of the model are a dependency oracle and a learning algorithm that integrates the dependency oracle, the structured perceptron, and beam search. Second, I present expected F-measure training and show how to derive a globally normalized RNN model, in which beam search is naturally incorporated and used in conjunction with the objective to learn shift-reduce action sequences optimized for the final evaluation metric. Finally, I describe an LSTM model that is able to construct parser state representations incrementally by following the shift-reduce syntactic derivation process; I show expected F-measure training, which is agnostic to the underlying neural network, can be applied in this setting to obtain globally normalized greedy and beam-search LSTM shift-reduce parsers.

Degree

thesis:*
Name dc:type.qualificationname
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Level dc:type.qualificationlevel
Doctoral
Grantor dc:publisher.institution
University of Cambridge
Year dc:date.issued
2017

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Xu, Wenduan
Advisor dc:contributor.advisor
  • Clark, Stephen

Subjects

dc:subject × 7

Rights

dc:rights
Language dc:language
en

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
DOI dc:identifier.doi
https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.16866
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/270026

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
Cambridge University
Base URL
api.repository.cam.ac.uk/server/oai/request
Last updated
2026-07-22
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
citation

Xu, Wenduan. Structured Learning with Inexact Search: Advances in Shift-Reduce CCG Parsing. Doctoral thesis, University of Cambridge, 2017. https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.16866