In the last decade, various restricted classes of non-projective dependency trees have been proposed with the goal of achieving a good tradeoff between parsing efficiency and coverage of the syntactic structures found in natural languages. We perform an extensive study measuring the coverage of a wide range of such classes on corpora of 30 languages under two different syntactic annotation criteria. The results show that, among the currently known relaxations of projectivity, the best tradeoff between coverage and computational complexity of exact parsing is achieved by either 1-endpoint-crossing trees or MHk trees, depending on the level of coverage desired. We also present some properties of the relation of MHk trees to other relevant classes of trees.

A syntactic dependency tree is projective if the yield of each node is a substring of the sentence—or equivalently, if no dependencies cross when drawn above the words.1 Projectivity is advantageous for efficient parsing: Exact inference for parsing models restricted to projective trees can be achieved in cubic time (Eisner 1996), and shift-reduce parsers can process them with very simple transitions in linear time (Nivre 2006). For this reason, and because crossing dependencies have traditionally been rare in corpora of languages like English, Chinese, or Japanese, many implementations of dependency parsers assume projectivity (Nivre 2006).

However, crossing dependencies are needed to represent some linguistic phenomena like topicalization, scrambling, wh-movement, or extraposition, so it is necessary for natural language parsers to support non-projectivity, especially when working with languages with flexible word order. Unfortunately, exact inference is intractable for models that support arbitrary non-projective trees, except under strong independence assumptions (McDonald and Satta 2007). For this reason, researchers have proposed various classes of mildly non-projective trees: restricted classes of trees that allow a limited degree of non-projectivity, permitting crossing dependencies only under certain conditions. The goal of these classes is to combine a high coverage of the syntactic phenomena found in real sentences with efficient parsing.2

In this article, we perform a comparison of a wide range of these relaxations of projectivity, with the goal of evaluating them in terms of the tradeoff between coverage and efficiency. For this purpose, we measure their coverage on a set of syntactic treebanks of 30 languages, analyzed under two different annotation criteria.

Thus, the main contribution of this work is that we provide homogeneous measurements of the coverage of a wide range of mildly non-projective classes of trees on a large collection of treebanks, relating them to their computational properties for parsing. To our knowledge, this is the first study providing an extensive comparison of such classes: Although Havelka (2007) also measured the coverage of several restrictions on non-projectivity, little was known at the time about which restrictions could be exploited for efficient parsing, so only a few of the classes discussed there are relevant for parsing. Furthermore, existing coverage data in the literature (both in that study and in the papers describing subsequently discovered classes of trees, cited herein) refer to small sets of treebanks that vary across reports, when reported at all.

Additionally, we present some results relating MHk trees, one of the sets with the best coverage–efficiency tradeoff, with other classes of mildly non-projective trees.

We now list the classes of trees considered in this study, outlining them very briefly. A full description of each class, with all the required definitions, is outside the scope of this article. We refer the reader to the provided references for further information.

Projective. Projective dependency trees can be parsed in O(n3) (see Section 1). We will denote the set of projective trees by Pr.

Well-nested with Bounded Gap Degree. Well-nested trees (Bodirsky, Kuhlmann, and Möhl 2005) are those that do not contain disjoint subtrees whose yields interleave (those that do are called ill-nested). Well-nested trees whose gap degree (the number of discontinuities—or gaps—in a node's yield) does not exceed a constant k can be parsed in time O(n5+2k) (Gómez-Rodríguez, Weir, and Carroll 2009; Gómez-Rodríguez, Carroll, and Weir 2011); and we will call them WGk trees. WGk trees have connections to constituent grammar formalisms, as tree-adjoining grammars induce WG1 trees and coupled context-free grammars induce WGk trees (Kuhlmann 2010).

Mild+1-Inherit and Gap-Minding. Gap inheritance (Pitler, Kannan, and Marcus 2012) is a restriction on the number of children of a node that can have arcs that cross a gap in its yield. Imposing gap inheritance bounds as additional restrictions on WG1 trees, two relevant classes of trees are obtained: Mild+1-Inherit (M1I) trees can be parsed in O(n6), and Mild+0-Inherit (M0I) trees, or gap-minding trees, in O(n5).

Head-Split. The head-split property is a restriction that forbids trees where a node's yield has a gap that includes its head, but not the gap in its head's yield. This allows dynamic programming parsers to split subtrees into two at the position of their heads, reducing the complexity of parsing several subclasses of WG1 trees: Satta and Kuhlmann (2013) show how WG1 trees with the head-split property (WG1S) can be parsed in O(n6), whereas for M1I trees with the head-split property (M1IS) the complexity is O(n5).

Mildly Ill-nested. A superset of WGk trees, mildly ill-nested trees of gap degree up to k (MGk) include all the dependency trees that have at least one binarization of gap degree k. They can be parsed in time O(n4+3k) (Gómez-Rodríguez, Carroll, and Weir 2011). Note that this is the same complexity as for WGk for k = 1, but larger for k > 1.

Attardi Degree 2. The set of trees that can be parsed with the transitions of degree up to 2 in the transition system of Attardi (2006) is also amenable to dynamic programming parsing, in time O(n7) (Cohen, Gómez-Rodríguez, and Satta 2011). This set, which we will call AD2, includes ill-nested trees and trees with unbounded gap degree.

MHktrees. Gómez-Rodríguez, Carroll, and Weir (2011) define a generalization of the tabular algorithm obtained from the shift-reduce parser of Yamada and Matsumoto (2003), or from the arc-hybrid transition system (Gómez-Rodríguez, Carroll, and Weir 2008; Kuhlmann, Gómez-Rodríguez, and Satta 2011). This parser, called MHk, has items representing a span dominated by several head nodes (hence the acronym, for “multi- headed”). It has complexity O(nk) and is projective for k = 3, but covers increasingly large sets of non-projective trees for values of k > 3, which we will call MHk trees.

1-Endpoint-Crossing. Pitler, Kannan, and Marcus (2013) define 1-Endpoint-Crossing trees (1EC trees) as dependency trees such that all the arcs that cross a given arc have a common vertex. This set of trees includes trees that are ill-nested and have unbounded gap degree, and can be parsed in O(n4) (Pitler, Kannan, and Marcus 2013; Pitler 2014).

k-Planar. k-Planar trees (k-P, equivalent to k-page book embeddings in graph theory) are those whose non-dummy arcs can be partitioned into k sets (called planes), in such a way that arcs belonging to the same plane do not cross (Yli-Jyrä 2003). No globally optimal parser is known for these trees, but they can be handled by a linear-time transition-based parser with k stacks (Gómez-Rodríguez and Nivre 2010, 2013).

k-Crossing Interval. k-Crossing Interval trees (k-C) are defined by Pitler and McDonald (2015) with a restriction on intervals formed by crossing arcs. 2-C trees can be parsed accurately with a linear-time shift-reduce parser with two registers (Pitler and McDonald 2015). 2-C trees are a subset of 1EC trees, which in turn are a subset of 2-P trees.

Corpora. We evaluate the coverage of each class described in Section 2 on HamleDT 2.0 (Rosa et al. 2014), a collection of harmonized versions of existing treebanks of 30 diverse languages, under two different annotations: Prague and Universal Stanford dependencies. Both annotation styles are interesting for parsing: The former tends to be easier to learn for monolingual parsers, but the latter is advantageous in multilingual settings (see Rosa [2015] and references therein). Thus, apart from spanning a variety of languages, these data sets allow us to see the influence of annotation criteria on the coverage of different restrictions on non-projectivity.

Methodology. For the classes of trees that have a known characterization independent of their parsers (i.e., all except AD2 and MHk), we determine whether each tree in the treebanks belongs to the class by using scripts that check for the required conditions. In the case of AD2, we run an implementation of the oracle by Cohen, Gómez-Rodríguez, and Satta (2013) for the Attardi parser restricted to degree 2, which has been shown to recognize exactly the trees of AD2 and its implementation checked against the dynamic programming algorithm of Cohen, Gómez-Rodríguez, and Satta (2011). Finally, in the case of MHk, we run a dynamic programming implementation of the parser itself.

All programs to measure coverage have been extensively tested with examples from the literature, custom-built sets of cases, known relations between classes (MH3 = Pr, 2-C ⊆ 1EPC ⊆ 2-P, WGk ⊆ MGk, etc.), runs on other treebanks to compare with previously reported coverages, and in some cases, comparison of more than one implementation.

The results of the coverage analysis are shown in Tables 1 and 2. For space reasons, we omit some of the classes with less direct practical interest: 1-P (a very mild relax- ation of projectivity, of limited interest for expanding coverage), k-C and k-P for k > 2 (transition systems for them are possible in theory, but likely impractical due to the extra transitions needed), and those whose best known parser is slower than O(n9), like WGk for k > 2.

Table 1 

Loss of coverage for each of the classes of restricted non-projective trees that have exact parsing algorithms running in O(nk) for k <= 7. The value of k is shown below the name of the class. For each treebank and class, we report the percentage of trees that do not belong to the class (i.e., lower is better). The best coverage for each complexity bound is highlighted in boldface.

Tree-bankTreesPr1ECMH4M0IM1ISMH5M1Iwg1sMH6WG1MG1AD2MH7
3445556667777
Stanford annotation 
ar 7541 72.19 2.84 4.36 16.25 14.92 0.21 14.84 14.92 0.08 14.84 14.64 0.86 0.040 
bg 13221 17.56 0.51 1.28 1.23 1.03 0.05 1.03 1.03 0.01 1.03 1.01 0.25 0.008 
bn 1129 7.00 0.18 0.44 0.89 0.27 0.00 0.27 0.27 0.00 0.27 0.09 0.27 0.000 
ca 14924 23.69 0.97 2.61 2.37 2.29 0.02 2.28 2.29 0.00 2.28 2.12 0.31 0.000 
cs 87913 26.28 2.22 3.00 3.37 2.71 0.17 2.65 2.71 0.01 2.65 2.32 1.00 0.002 
da 5512 29.75 2.99 5.59 5.77 3.37 0.65 3.32 3.37 0.11 3.32 2.54 3.18 0.018 
de 38020 36.21 5.13 5.77 9.19 6.43 0.61 5.57 6.43 0.08 5.57 4.44 3.42 0.011 
el 2902 34.36 3.48 4.20 5.17 3.86 0.10 3.48 3.86 0.00 3.48 3.14 0.90 0.000 
en 18791 23.18 1.24 2.80 3.48 3.24 0.27 3.23 3.24 0.02 3.23 2.72 0.94 0.011 
es 15984 24.46 1.33 2.24 1.71 1.69 0.01 1.69 1.69 0.00 1.69 1.51 0.30 0.000 
et 1315 2.13 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.000 
eu 11225 25.58 2.69 2.17 7.34 6.25 0.23 6.17 6.25 0.03 6.17 0.87 1.28 0.000 
fa 12455 23.85 2.38 2.72 4.34 2.40 0.49 2.18 2.40 0.16 2.18 1.46 1.68 0.048 
fi 4307 14.95 1.49 2.02 2.28 1.93 0.21 1.93 1.93 0.12 1.93 1.83 1.28 0.093 
grc 21173 67.84 30.64 26.55 31.81 27.42 3.64 26.21 27.40 0.23 26.19 12.44 8.45 0.009 
hi 13274 23.11 3.36 3.33 5.58 2.92 0.62 2.76 2.92 0.17 2.76 1.36 2.66 0.045 
hu 6424 31.97 5.74 10.13 12.16 7.22 1.90 7.19 7.22 0.30 7.19 6.74 7.38 0.078 
it 3359 31.08 3.16 1.67 2.89 3.01 0.18 2.14 3.01 0.00 2.14 1.76 0.83 0.000 
ja 17753 29.44 5.04 2.43 5.05 3.68 0.25 3.59 3.66 0.03 3.57 1.04 1.17 0.011 
la 3473 50.13 15.98 15.78 17.48 11.49 2.74 10.48 11.46 0.32 10.45 6.82 8.52 0.029 
nl 13735 43.25 8.24 9.07 8.85 6.50 1.01 5.03 6.50 0.17 5.03 4.54 5.81 0.058 
pt 9359 30.11 2.09 6.03 7.84 6.32 0.42 6.21 6.32 0.04 6.21 6.09 2.29 0.011 
ro 4042 3.66 0.00 0.05 0.05 0.05 0.00 0.05 0.05 0.00 0.05 0.05 0.03 0.000 
ru 34895 18.34 0.86 1.02 0.97 0.55 0.03 0.52 0.54 0.00 0.52 0.34 0.46 0.000 
sk 57408 23.17 2.31 2.78 3.44 2.87 0.23 2.71 2.87 0.02 2.70 2.48 1.00 0.005 
sl 1936 27.27 3.98 4.18 4.34 3.20 0.57 3.05 3.20 0.05 3.05 2.74 2.22 0.000 
sv 11431 21.25 2.07 2.19 3.17 2.09 0.44 2.00 2.07 0.18 1.97 1.11 1.26 0.061 
ta 600 3.33 0.00 0.00 0.83 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.000 
te 1450 1.79 0.00 0.00 0.14 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.000 
tr 5935 24.72 3.30 3.17 8.91 6.87 0.73 6.82 6.87 0.24 6.82 5.81 1.90 0.051 
Macro avg 26.39 3.81 4.25 5.90 4.49 0.53 4.25 4.48 0.08 4.24 3.07 1.99 0.020 
Prague annotation 
ar 7541 11.50 0.29 0.62 3.29 0.21 0.08 0.20 0.21 0.01 0.20 0.16 0.54 0.000 
bg 13221 11.10 0.17 4.32 4.33 0.16 0.17 0.16 0.16 0.08 0.16 0.16 4.30 0.015 
bn 1129 5.93 0.18 0.35 0.97 0.18 0.00 0.18 0.18 0.00 0.18 0.00 0.27 0.000 
ca 14924 5.87 0.02 0.47 0.22 0.09 0.03 0.09 0.09 0.01 0.09 0.09 0.45 0.000 
cs 87913 23.61 1.33 1.59 2.82 0.74 0.10 0.59 0.74 0.01 0.59 0.49 0.96 0.003 
da 5512 15.62 0.71 3.05 3.83 0.35 0.93 0.33 0.35 0.31 0.33 0.22 2.85 0.109 
de 38020 37.01 5.48 6.10 10.65 5.74 0.67 4.77 5.74 0.10 4.77 3.96 4.04 0.024 
el 2902 21.57 1.34 2.14 5.31 1.00 0.14 0.79 1.00 0.03 0.79 0.79 1.55 0.000 
en 18791 6.38 0.71 1.01 1.20 0.63 0.15 0.62 0.63 0.03 0.62 0.08 0.95 0.011 
es 15984 7.31 0.02 0.34 0.69 0.16 0.03 0.16 0.16 0.00 0.16 0.16 0.26 0.000 
et 1315 0.84 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.000 
eu 11225 17.53 1.61 1.97 3.71 0.86 0.29 0.72 0.86 0.05 0.72 0.45 1.39 0.009 
fa 12455 20.72 2.39 3.01 6.79 1.46 0.72 1.30 1.46 0.30 1.30 0.68 2.51 0.120 
fi 4307 11.82 0.58 0.79 1.16 0.16 0.14 0.12 0.16 0.12 0.12 0.12 0.63 0.070 
grc 21173 77.44 30.97 31.61 30.86 17.80 4.42 10.22 17.80 0.28 10.22 8.65 10.67 0.019 
hi 13274 29.95 2.52 5.94 7.70 1.82 1.79 1.73 1.81 0.49 1.72 1.21 5.14 0.196 
hu 6424 27.41 4.39 9.17 11.40 5.98 1.73 5.95 5.98 0.23 5.95 5.62 7.22 0.125 
it 3359 8.16 0.45 1.07 2.50 0.54 0.09 0.54 0.54 0.06 0.54 0.36 0.92 0.060 
ja 17753 5.29 1.43 0.45 4.05 0.57 0.04 0.57 0.57 0.00 0.57 0.57 0.19 0.000 
la 3473 50.45 15.06 14.77 21.16 11.09 2.45 9.56 11.03 0.32 9.50 5.82 10.28 0.086 
nl 13735 35.75 4.27 9.55 9.54 4.40 1.51 3.44 4.40 0.24 3.44 3.36 7.82 0.066 
pt 9359 19.95 0.67 4.57 7.01 4.77 0.49 4.73 4.77 0.10 4.73 4.68 2.56 0.032 
ro 4042 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.000 
ru 34895 9.61 0.29 0.70 1.14 0.21 0.04 0.20 0.21 0.00 0.20 0.10 0.54 0.000 
sk 57408 17.84 0.97 1.32 2.92 0.77 0.12 0.68 0.77 0.02 0.68 0.56 0.87 0.007 
sl 1936 20.87 1.14 1.96 3.41 0.88 0.26 0.78 0.88 0.00 0.78 0.67 1.65 0.000 
sv 11431 11.03 1.44 1.55 3.26 1.02 0.35 0.98 1.01 0.14 0.97 0.50 1.11 0.061 
ta 600 2.00 0.00 0.00 1.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.000 
te 1450 0.83 0.00 0.00 0.14 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.000 
tr 5935 31.95 6.86 8.16 16.18 9.08 2.21 9.00 9.00 0.54 8.91 8.69 4.72 0.152 
Macro avg 18.18 2.84 3.89 5.57 2.35 0.63 1.95 2.35 0.12 1.94 1.60 2.48 0.039 
Tree-bankTreesPr1ECMH4M0IM1ISMH5M1Iwg1sMH6WG1MG1AD2MH7
3445556667777
Stanford annotation 
ar 7541 72.19 2.84 4.36 16.25 14.92 0.21 14.84 14.92 0.08 14.84 14.64 0.86 0.040 
bg 13221 17.56 0.51 1.28 1.23 1.03 0.05 1.03 1.03 0.01 1.03 1.01 0.25 0.008 
bn 1129 7.00 0.18 0.44 0.89 0.27 0.00 0.27 0.27 0.00 0.27 0.09 0.27 0.000 
ca 14924 23.69 0.97 2.61 2.37 2.29 0.02 2.28 2.29 0.00 2.28 2.12 0.31 0.000 
cs 87913 26.28 2.22 3.00 3.37 2.71 0.17 2.65 2.71 0.01 2.65 2.32 1.00 0.002 
da 5512 29.75 2.99 5.59 5.77 3.37 0.65 3.32 3.37 0.11 3.32 2.54 3.18 0.018 
de 38020 36.21 5.13 5.77 9.19 6.43 0.61 5.57 6.43 0.08 5.57 4.44 3.42 0.011 
el 2902 34.36 3.48 4.20 5.17 3.86 0.10 3.48 3.86 0.00 3.48 3.14 0.90 0.000 
en 18791 23.18 1.24 2.80 3.48 3.24 0.27 3.23 3.24 0.02 3.23 2.72 0.94 0.011 
es 15984 24.46 1.33 2.24 1.71 1.69 0.01 1.69 1.69 0.00 1.69 1.51 0.30 0.000 
et 1315 2.13 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.000 
eu 11225 25.58 2.69 2.17 7.34 6.25 0.23 6.17 6.25 0.03 6.17 0.87 1.28 0.000 
fa 12455 23.85 2.38 2.72 4.34 2.40 0.49 2.18 2.40 0.16 2.18 1.46 1.68 0.048 
fi 4307 14.95 1.49 2.02 2.28 1.93 0.21 1.93 1.93 0.12 1.93 1.83 1.28 0.093 
grc 21173 67.84 30.64 26.55 31.81 27.42 3.64 26.21 27.40 0.23 26.19 12.44 8.45 0.009 
hi 13274 23.11 3.36 3.33 5.58 2.92 0.62 2.76 2.92 0.17 2.76 1.36 2.66 0.045 
hu 6424 31.97 5.74 10.13 12.16 7.22 1.90 7.19 7.22 0.30 7.19 6.74 7.38 0.078 
it 3359 31.08 3.16 1.67 2.89 3.01 0.18 2.14 3.01 0.00 2.14 1.76 0.83 0.000 
ja 17753 29.44 5.04 2.43 5.05 3.68 0.25 3.59 3.66 0.03 3.57 1.04 1.17 0.011 
la 3473 50.13 15.98 15.78 17.48 11.49 2.74 10.48 11.46 0.32 10.45 6.82 8.52 0.029 
nl 13735 43.25 8.24 9.07 8.85 6.50 1.01 5.03 6.50 0.17 5.03 4.54 5.81 0.058 
pt 9359 30.11 2.09 6.03 7.84 6.32 0.42 6.21 6.32 0.04 6.21 6.09 2.29 0.011 
ro 4042 3.66 0.00 0.05 0.05 0.05 0.00 0.05 0.05 0.00 0.05 0.05 0.03 0.000 
ru 34895 18.34 0.86 1.02 0.97 0.55 0.03 0.52 0.54 0.00 0.52 0.34 0.46 0.000 
sk 57408 23.17 2.31 2.78 3.44 2.87 0.23 2.71 2.87 0.02 2.70 2.48 1.00 0.005 
sl 1936 27.27 3.98 4.18 4.34 3.20 0.57 3.05 3.20 0.05 3.05 2.74 2.22 0.000 
sv 11431 21.25 2.07 2.19 3.17 2.09 0.44 2.00 2.07 0.18 1.97 1.11 1.26 0.061 
ta 600 3.33 0.00 0.00 0.83 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.000 
te 1450 1.79 0.00 0.00 0.14 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.000 
tr 5935 24.72 3.30 3.17 8.91 6.87 0.73 6.82 6.87 0.24 6.82 5.81 1.90 0.051 
Macro avg 26.39 3.81 4.25 5.90 4.49 0.53 4.25 4.48 0.08 4.24 3.07 1.99 0.020 
Prague annotation 
ar 7541 11.50 0.29 0.62 3.29 0.21 0.08 0.20 0.21 0.01 0.20 0.16 0.54 0.000 
bg 13221 11.10 0.17 4.32 4.33 0.16 0.17 0.16 0.16 0.08 0.16 0.16 4.30 0.015 
bn 1129 5.93 0.18 0.35 0.97 0.18 0.00 0.18 0.18 0.00 0.18 0.00 0.27 0.000 
ca 14924 5.87 0.02 0.47 0.22 0.09 0.03 0.09 0.09 0.01 0.09 0.09 0.45 0.000 
cs 87913 23.61 1.33 1.59 2.82 0.74 0.10 0.59 0.74 0.01 0.59 0.49 0.96 0.003 
da 5512 15.62 0.71 3.05 3.83 0.35 0.93 0.33 0.35 0.31 0.33 0.22 2.85 0.109 
de 38020 37.01 5.48 6.10 10.65 5.74 0.67 4.77 5.74 0.10 4.77 3.96 4.04 0.024 
el 2902 21.57 1.34 2.14 5.31 1.00 0.14 0.79 1.00 0.03 0.79 0.79 1.55 0.000 
en 18791 6.38 0.71 1.01 1.20 0.63 0.15 0.62 0.63 0.03 0.62 0.08 0.95 0.011 
es 15984 7.31 0.02 0.34 0.69 0.16 0.03 0.16 0.16 0.00 0.16 0.16 0.26 0.000 
et 1315 0.84 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.000 
eu 11225 17.53 1.61 1.97 3.71 0.86 0.29 0.72 0.86 0.05 0.72 0.45 1.39 0.009 
fa 12455 20.72 2.39 3.01 6.79 1.46 0.72 1.30 1.46 0.30 1.30 0.68 2.51 0.120 
fi 4307 11.82 0.58 0.79 1.16 0.16 0.14 0.12 0.16 0.12 0.12 0.12 0.63 0.070 
grc 21173 77.44 30.97 31.61 30.86 17.80 4.42 10.22 17.80 0.28 10.22 8.65 10.67 0.019 
hi 13274 29.95 2.52 5.94 7.70 1.82 1.79 1.73 1.81 0.49 1.72 1.21 5.14 0.196 
hu 6424 27.41 4.39 9.17 11.40 5.98 1.73 5.95 5.98 0.23 5.95 5.62 7.22 0.125 
it 3359 8.16 0.45 1.07 2.50 0.54 0.09 0.54 0.54 0.06 0.54 0.36 0.92 0.060 
ja 17753 5.29 1.43 0.45 4.05 0.57 0.04 0.57 0.57 0.00 0.57 0.57 0.19 0.000 
la 3473 50.45 15.06 14.77 21.16 11.09 2.45 9.56 11.03 0.32 9.50 5.82 10.28 0.086 
nl 13735 35.75 4.27 9.55 9.54 4.40 1.51 3.44 4.40 0.24 3.44 3.36 7.82 0.066 
pt 9359 19.95 0.67 4.57 7.01 4.77 0.49 4.73 4.77 0.10 4.73 4.68 2.56 0.032 
ro 4042 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.000 
ru 34895 9.61 0.29 0.70 1.14 0.21 0.04 0.20 0.21 0.00 0.20 0.10 0.54 0.000 
sk 57408 17.84 0.97 1.32 2.92 0.77 0.12 0.68 0.77 0.02 0.68 0.56 0.87 0.007 
sl 1936 20.87 1.14 1.96 3.41 0.88 0.26 0.78 0.88 0.00 0.78 0.67 1.65 0.000 
sv 11431 11.03 1.44 1.55 3.26 1.02 0.35 0.98 1.01 0.14 0.97 0.50 1.11 0.061 
ta 600 2.00 0.00 0.00 1.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.000 
te 1450 0.83 0.00 0.00 0.14 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.000 
tr 5935 31.95 6.86 8.16 16.18 9.08 2.21 9.00 9.00 0.54 8.91 8.69 4.72 0.152 
Macro avg 18.18 2.84 3.89 5.57 2.35 0.63 1.95 2.35 0.12 1.94 1.60 2.48 0.039 
Table 2 

Loss of coverage for classes of restricted non-projective trees not shown in Table 1. For classes that have exact parsing algorithms running in O(nk), the value of k is shown below the name of the class. For each treebank and class, we report the percentage of trees that do not belong to the class (i.e., lower is better). The best coverage for each complexity bound is shown in boldface.

TreebankMH8WG2MH92-P2-CTreebankMH8WG2MH92-P2-C
Stanford ann.899n/an/aPrague ann.899n/an/a
ar (Arabic) 0.027 3.819 0.027 0.278 31.044 ar 0.000 0.066 0.000 0.013 0.756 
bg (Bulgarian) 0.008 0.098 0.000 0.045 1.482 bg 0.008 0.000 0.000 0.015 0.613 
bn (Bengali) 0.000 0.177 0.000 0.000 0.266 bn 0.000 0.177 0.000 0.000 0.354 
ca (Catalan) 0.000 0.281 0.000 0.067 2.627 ca 0.000 0.013 0.000 0.000 0.181 
cs (Czech) 0.001 0.543 0.001 0.415 4.094 cs 0.002 0.131 0.002 0.099 2.894 
da (Danish) 0.000 0.998 0.000 0.744 5.443 da 0.036 0.127 0.000 0.018 1.361 
de (German) 0.008 2.078 0.003 1.231 8.951 de 0.000 1.228 0.000 1.021 9.771 
el (Mod. Greek) 0.000 0.965 0.000 0.379 7.271 el 0.000 0.103 0.000 0.172 2.757 
en (English) 0.005 0.841 0.005 0.644 2.522 en 0.011 0.596 0.005 0.553 0.798 
es (Spanish) 0.000 0.282 0.000 0.069 2.803 es 0.000 0.025 0.000 0.000 0.119 
et (Estonian) 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 et 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 
eu (Basque) 0.000 5.826 0.000 0.249 4.686 eu 0.000 0.374 0.000 0.143 2.601 
fa (Persian) 0.024 1.124 0.008 0.385 4.906 fa 0.064 0.923 0.032 0.225 3.605 
fi (Finnish) 0.023 0.395 0.000 0.859 1.788 fi 0.023 0.023 0.000 0.070 0.882 
grc (Anc. Greek) 0.005 20.247 0.000 6.282 36.565 grc 0.000 2.829 0.000 3.495 39.347 
hi (Hindi) 0.015 1.944 0.000 0.203 4.821 hi 0.045 0.768 0.023 0.105 5.176 
hu (Hungarian) 0.000 2.086 0.000 0.794 8.266 hu 0.016 1.666 0.016 0.607 5.791 
it (Italian) 0.000 0.804 0.000 0.298 6.490 it 0.000 0.268 0.000 0.060 0.744 
ja (Japanese) 0.000 3.002 0.000 0.107 6.095 ja 0.000 0.101 0.000 0.000 1.594 
la (Latin) 0.000 5.845 0.000 3.974 21.250 la 0.000 5.644 0.000 3.858 21.653 
nl (Dutch) 0.015 1.172 0.007 0.961 14.503 nl 0.007 0.197 0.000 1.201 9.661 
pt (Portuguese) 0.000 1.036 0.000 0.224 5.204 pt 0.032 0.801 0.011 0.107 1.667 
ro (Romanian) 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.049 ro 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 
ru (Russian) 0.000 0.201 0.000 0.077 1.656 ru 0.000 0.100 0.000 0.026 0.516 
sk (Slovak) 0.002 0.597 0.000 0.493 4.053 sk 0.002 0.172 0.000 0.099 2.045 
sl (Slovenian) 0.000 0.723 0.000 1.188 6.095 sl 0.000 0.155 0.000 0.052 2.583 
sv (Swedish) 0.026 1.233 0.009 0.744 3.351 sv 0.026 0.656 0.026 0.542 2.021 
ta (Tamil) 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.167 ta 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 
te (Telugu) 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 te 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 
tr (Turkish) 0.017 4.482 0.017 0.253 5.173 tr 0.034 3.370 0.000 0.084 10.025 
Macro average 0.006 2.027 0.003 0.699 6.721 Macro avg. 0.010 0.684 0.004 0.419 4.317 
TreebankMH8WG2MH92-P2-CTreebankMH8WG2MH92-P2-C
Stanford ann.899n/an/aPrague ann.899n/an/a
ar (Arabic) 0.027 3.819 0.027 0.278 31.044 ar 0.000 0.066 0.000 0.013 0.756 
bg (Bulgarian) 0.008 0.098 0.000 0.045 1.482 bg 0.008 0.000 0.000 0.015 0.613 
bn (Bengali) 0.000 0.177 0.000 0.000 0.266 bn 0.000 0.177 0.000 0.000 0.354 
ca (Catalan) 0.000 0.281 0.000 0.067 2.627 ca 0.000 0.013 0.000 0.000 0.181 
cs (Czech) 0.001 0.543 0.001 0.415 4.094 cs 0.002 0.131 0.002 0.099 2.894 
da (Danish) 0.000 0.998 0.000 0.744 5.443 da 0.036 0.127 0.000 0.018 1.361 
de (German) 0.008 2.078 0.003 1.231 8.951 de 0.000 1.228 0.000 1.021 9.771 
el (Mod. Greek) 0.000 0.965 0.000 0.379 7.271 el 0.000 0.103 0.000 0.172 2.757 
en (English) 0.005 0.841 0.005 0.644 2.522 en 0.011 0.596 0.005 0.553 0.798 
es (Spanish) 0.000 0.282 0.000 0.069 2.803 es 0.000 0.025 0.000 0.000 0.119 
et (Estonian) 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 et 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 
eu (Basque) 0.000 5.826 0.000 0.249 4.686 eu 0.000 0.374 0.000 0.143 2.601 
fa (Persian) 0.024 1.124 0.008 0.385 4.906 fa 0.064 0.923 0.032 0.225 3.605 
fi (Finnish) 0.023 0.395 0.000 0.859 1.788 fi 0.023 0.023 0.000 0.070 0.882 
grc (Anc. Greek) 0.005 20.247 0.000 6.282 36.565 grc 0.000 2.829 0.000 3.495 39.347 
hi (Hindi) 0.015 1.944 0.000 0.203 4.821 hi 0.045 0.768 0.023 0.105 5.176 
hu (Hungarian) 0.000 2.086 0.000 0.794 8.266 hu 0.016 1.666 0.016 0.607 5.791 
it (Italian) 0.000 0.804 0.000 0.298 6.490 it 0.000 0.268 0.000 0.060 0.744 
ja (Japanese) 0.000 3.002 0.000 0.107 6.095 ja 0.000 0.101 0.000 0.000 1.594 
la (Latin) 0.000 5.845 0.000 3.974 21.250 la 0.000 5.644 0.000 3.858 21.653 
nl (Dutch) 0.015 1.172 0.007 0.961 14.503 nl 0.007 0.197 0.000 1.201 9.661 
pt (Portuguese) 0.000 1.036 0.000 0.224 5.204 pt 0.032 0.801 0.011 0.107 1.667 
ro (Romanian) 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.049 ro 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 
ru (Russian) 0.000 0.201 0.000 0.077 1.656 ru 0.000 0.100 0.000 0.026 0.516 
sk (Slovak) 0.002 0.597 0.000 0.493 4.053 sk 0.002 0.172 0.000 0.099 2.045 
sl (Slovenian) 0.000 0.723 0.000 1.188 6.095 sl 0.000 0.155 0.000 0.052 2.583 
sv (Swedish) 0.026 1.233 0.009 0.744 3.351 sv 0.026 0.656 0.026 0.542 2.021 
ta (Tamil) 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.167 ta 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 
te (Telugu) 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 te 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 
tr (Turkish) 0.017 4.482 0.017 0.253 5.173 tr 0.034 3.370 0.000 0.084 10.025 
Macro average 0.006 2.027 0.003 0.699 6.721 Macro avg. 0.010 0.684 0.004 0.419 4.317 

The results provide interesting insights into the coverage of the different classes on a diverse set of corpora with varying amounts of non-projectivity, ranging from the total projectivity of the Prague-style Romanian treebank to the very high non-projectivity in the corpora of classical languages—probably influenced by the presence of poetic texts in them—or in the Stanford-annotated Arabic data set.

Annotation criteria have a large influence on the adequacy of the different restrictions on non-projectivity. The Stanford treebanks not only tend to contain more non-projectivity than the Prague ones, but also more ill-nested trees and trees with higher gap degree. For example, the average proportion of trees that are not in WG1 is more than double on Stanford than on Prague treebanks, with huge differences in some cases (e.g., 14.84% vs. 0.20% on the Arabic corpora). The same trend appears in the other classes requiring well-nestedness and bounded gap degree. The finding that WG1 covers almost all phenomena found in treebanks, reported in smaller data sets in the past (Kuhlmann 2010; Gómez-Rodríguez, Carroll, and Weir 2011), is questionable for Stanford treebanks, as it excludes more than 5% of the trees in nine languages.

However, this does not mean that Stanford dependencies are less amenable to mildly non-projective parsing in general, as the Attardi parser and the MHk parsers for k > 4 have better coverage for the Stanford than for the Prague-annotated treebanks. Thus, the lower coverage of the well-nested parsers on the Stanford treebanks does not exclusively owe to them having more non-projectivity in a general sense, but rather different kinds of non-projectivity that are better captured with different restrictions.

Overall, the class with the best coverage among those with known globally optimal parsers running in time O(n4) is 1EC, which even surpasses WG1 (O(n7)) on average on the Stanford treebanks. But if we are willing to accept larger complexities, the best tradeoff is achieved with the MHk parsers. The average coverage is close to 99.5% for MH5, and practically full for MH7 , only excluding 177 trees out of the more than 800, 000 analyzed overall. MH12 (not shown in the tables) has full coverage of the 60 treebanks.

The results for the 2-P and 2-C classes, parsable with transition systems, are less surprising, with similar coverage to that reported for smaller sets of treebanks in the respective papers (Gómez-Rodríguez and Nivre 2013; Pitler and McDonald 2015). Note that, although 2-C has notably less coverage than 2-P, its transition system has been shown to have very good empirical accuracy, probably because it is an easier to learn model.

We have measured the coverage of a wide range of classes of mildly non-projective dependency trees on a large collection of treebanks with two different annotation styles, providing valuable data to compare said classes in terms of balance between coverage and efficiency. The relative coverage of the different classes varies across languages and annotation criteria. Explaining the concrete factors affecting it for each individual language is outside the scope of this work, and an interesting subject for studies focused on particular languages and corpora. However, despite this variability, there are very clear trends in the results. A relevant one is that the best general tradeoff is achieved by 1-Endpoint-Crossing trees (for complexity O(n4)) and MHk trees (for larger polynomial complexities).

Although we have focused on the coverage-efficiency tradeoff, there are other aspects of mildly non-projective classes that one may wish to take into account, like their relation to constituency grammar formalisms (Kuhlmann 2010) or characterizability (Pitler and McDonald 2015). In this sense, it is worth noting that no characterization independent of the parsing algorithm itself is known for the MHk classes, for k > 3, just as happens with Attardi trees. In fact, MHk trees have been very little studied, and their empirical coverage was unknown prior to this work. Because it is notably high, finding a simple characterization of MHk trees is an interesting open problem, which may be solvable as MHk trees have some desirable formal properties that AD2 trees lack, like left-right symmetry (reversing the order of the words of an MHk tree produces an MHk tree).

Two novel observations about the relation of MHk trees to other classes of trees are that: (1) MH4 contains ill-nested trees with unbounded gap degree (and therefore, the same can be said of MHk for k > 4, as MHk−1 ⊆ MHk for all k); and (2) MH4 ⊆ 2-P.

Observation (1) can be shown by example, with the tree in Figure 1, and an outline of the proof for (2) follows: given the MH4 parser (shown in Figure 2), we build a variant that associates each arc with a plane ∈ {P0, P1}, satisfying the 2-P constraint. To do so, we annotate each index (node) on items with a forbidden plane, such that steps creating an arc hd always do so on a plane not forbidden for h or d. If both planes are allowed, then if the item has a node x between h and d with a forbidden plane, the arc is created on that plane (to avoid forbidding both planes on x at the same time), otherwise an arbitrary plane is chosen. Initial items do not have any restrictions, but when we create a right arc A = h1h3 with a Link step [h1, h2, h3, h4] ⊢ [h1, h2, h4] on plane Pi, we forbid Pi on node h2 (located between h1 and h3), which prevents arcs that cross A from being created on the same plane as A, and the symmetric is done for left arcs. Annotations are propagated across deductions together with their nodes.

Figure 1 

An ill-nested dependency tree with gap degree g that is in MH4. It can be parsed by the MH4 parser starting by building the item [bg−1, ag, bg, bg + 1] and then proceeding from right to left.

Figure 1 

An ill-nested dependency tree with gap degree g that is in MH4. It can be parsed by the MH4 parser starting by building the item [bg−1, ag, bg, bg + 1] and then proceeding from right to left.

Close modal
Figure 2 

Deduction system for the MH4 parser for a string of length n.

Figure 2 

Deduction system for the MH4 parser for a string of length n.

Close modal

Parsing a tree T with always produces a valid partition of T into planes, that is, it never reaches a situation where an arc cannot be created without violating 2-planarity because both planes are forbidden by the restrictions. This is shown by proving that each item has at most one node with a forbidden plane. To see this, note that the first and last nodes of an item cannot have any forbidden plane: by construction, restrictions always originate on the central node of a 3-node item, and no steps in the parser can move a node in the middle to the first or last position. Restrictions can propagate to 4-node items, but these always come from applying a Combine step on a 3- and a 2-node item, so again at most one node (the central one in the 3-node item) can have a forbidden plane. Thus, we can always associate a plane to an arc without violating restrictions, as there can be only one restriction per item and therefore at least one plane is allowed.

Note that this proof implicitly relies on the fact that, when the MH4 parser creates an arc A, any subsequently built arcs crossing A must share an endpoint: for example, after the arc A = hd is created by a deduction step [h, x, d, y] ⊢ [h, x, y], the only endpoint located between h and d remaining available is x, so any subsequent arcs crossing A must be incident to x. This restriction is interestingly similar to the definition of 1EC trees, although weaker because it only affects arcs created after A.

The relation of MH4 with the 2-P class, as well as its indirect relation with 1EC, may help obtain a characterization for the set of MHk trees. Their good balance between coverage and parsing efficiency makes this class, together with 1EC trees, very interesting for modeling the non-projectivity found in natural languages.

The author is partially funded by the TELEPARES-UDC project from MINECO (FFI2014-51978-C2-2-R) and an Oportunius program grant from Xunta de Galicia.

1 

We will assume the conventional representation of syntactic dependency analyses as trees rooted at a dummy node. Its presence and location (Ballesteros and Nivre 2013) has no effect on the coverage of the considered classes of trees, except for 1-endpoint-crossing trees and crossing-interval trees. In these cases, we assume that the dummy root is located on the left, as in the papers in which they were defined.

2 

Another option is to use models that forgo exact inference, but still achieve competitive results for non-projective parsing in quadratic (Nivre 2008) or even linear time (Nivre 2009).

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Author notes

*

Research Group on Language and Information Society (LyS), Departamento de Computación, Universidade da Coruña, Campus de A Coruña, 15071, A Coruña, Spain. E-mail: [email protected].