Computational Linguistics (Mar 2021)

Comparing Knowledge-Intensive and Data-Intensive Models for English Resource Semantic Parsing

  • Junjie Cao,
  • Zi Lin,
  • Weiwei Sun,
  • Xiaojun Wan

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1162/coli_a_00395
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 47, no. 1
pp. 43 – 68

Abstract

Read online

AbstractIn this work, we present a phenomenon-oriented comparative analysis of the two dominant approaches in English Resource Semantic (ERS) parsing: classic, knowledge-intensive and neural, data-intensive models. To reflect state-of-the-art neural NLP technologies, a factorization-based parser is introduced that can produce Elementary Dependency Structures much more accurately than previous data-driven parsers. We conduct a suite of tests for different linguistic phenomena to analyze the grammatical competence of different parsers, where we show that, despite comparable performance overall, knowledge- and data-intensive models produce different types of errors, in a way that can be explained by their theoretical properties. This analysis is beneficial to in-depth evaluation of several representative parsing techniques and leads to new directions for parser development.