Improving Unsupervised Constituency Parsing via Maximizing Semantic Information
Junjie Chen, Xiangheng He, Yusuke Miyao, Danushka Bollegala
Abstract
Unsupervised constituency parsers organize phrases within a sentence into a tree-shaped syntactic constituent structure that reflects the organization of sentence semantics. However, the traditional objective of maximizing sentence log-likelihood (LL) does not explicitly account for the close relationship between the constituent structure and the semantics, resulting in a weak correlation between LL values and parsing accuracy. In this paper, we introduce a novel objective that trains parsers by maximizing SemInfo, the semantic information encoded in constituent structures. We introduce a bag-of-substrings model to represent the semantics and estimate the SemInfo value using the probability-weighted information metric. We apply the SemInfo maximization objective to training Probabilistic Context-Free Grammar (PCFG) parsers and develop a Tree Conditional Random Field (TreeCRF)-based model to facilitate the training. Experiments show that SemInfo correlates more strongly with parsing accuracy than LL, establishing SemInfo as a better unsupervised parsing objective. As a result, our algorithm significantly improves parsing accuracy by an average of 7.85 sentence-F1 scores across five PCFG variants and in four languages, achieving state-of-the-art level results in three of the four languages.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{
chen2025improving,
title={Improving Unsupervised Constituency Parsing via Maximizing Semantic Information},
author={Junjie Chen and Xiangheng He and Yusuke Miyao and Danushka Bollegala},
booktitle={The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations},
year={2025},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=qyU5s4fzLg}
}