Estimating Compact Yet Rich Tree Insertion Grammars

Abstract

We present a Bayesian nonparametric model for estimating tree insertion grammars (TIG), building upon recent work in Bayesian inference of tree substitution grammars (TSG) via Dirichlet processes. Under our general variant of TIG, grammars are estimated via the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm that uses a context free grammar transformation as a proposal, which allows for cubic-time string parsing as well as tree-wide joint sampling of derivations in the spirit of Cohn and Blunsom (2010). We use the Penn treebank for our experiments and find that our proposal Bayesian TIG model not only has competitive parsing performance but also finds compact yet linguistically rich TIG representations of the data.