Two-phase S-clause segmentation

Abstract

When a dependency parser analyzes long sentences with fewer subjects than predicates, it is difficult for it to recognize which predicate governs which subject. To handle such syntactic ambiguity between subjects and predicates, we define an "a subject clause (s-clause)" as a group of words containing several predicates and their common subject. This paper proposes a two-phase method for S-clause segmentation. The first phase reduces the number of candidates of S-clause boundaries, and the second performs S-clause segmentation using decision trees. In experimental evaluation, the S-clause information turned out to be effective for determining the governor of a subject and that of a predicate in dependency parsing. Further syntactic analysis using S-clauses achieved an improvement in precision of 5 percent.