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Combinatory Categorical Grammar
2024/07/12
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Combinatory Categorical Grammar (CCG; Steedman, 2000) is a highly lexicalized formalism. The standard parsing model of Clark and Curran (2007) uses over 400 lexical categories (or supertags), compared to about 50 part-of-speech tags for typical parsers.

Parsing

CCG parsing is evaluated in terms of labeled dependency F-score, which “take[s] into account the lexical category containing the dependency relation, the argument slot, the word associated with the lexical category, and the argument head word: All four must be correct to score a point” (Clark & Curran, 2007). Besides the word forms, some popular parsers (like the C&C parser) take POS tags as input. For fair comparison, systems should use automatically obtained POS as input, though some papers additionally report performance with oracle gold-standard POS features.

CCGBank

The CCGBank is a corpus of CCG derivations and dependency structures extracted from the Penn Treebank by Hockenmaier and Steedman (2007). Sections 2-21 are used for training, section 00 for development, and section 23 as in-domain test set.

ModelLabeled F-scorePaper / Source
Prange et al. (2021), non-constructive90.91Supertagging the Long Tail with Tree-Structured Decoding of Complex Categories
Bhargava and Penn (2020), constructive90.9Supertagging with CCG primitives
Prange et al. (2021), constructive90.79Supertagging the Long Tail with Tree-Structured Decoding of Complex Categories
Vaswani et al. (2016)88.32Supertagging with LSTMs
Lewis et al. (2016)88.1LSTM CCG Parsing
Xu et al. (2015)87.04CCG Supertagging with a Recurrent Neural Network
Kummerfeld et al. (2010), with additional unlabeled data85.95Faster Parsing by Supertagger Adaptation
Clark and Curran (2007)85.45Wide-Coverage Efficient Statistical Parsing with CCG and Log-Linear Models

Wikipedia

ModelAccuracyPaper / Source
Xu et al. (2015)82.49CCG Supertagging with a Recurrent Neural Network
Kummerfeld et al. (2010), with additional unlabeled data81.7Faster Parsing by Supertagger Adaptation

Bioinfer

ModelBio-specific taggers?AccuracyPaper / Source
Kummerfeld et al. (2010), with additional unlabeled dataYes82.3Faster Parsing by Supertagger Adaptation
Rimell and Clark (2008)Yes81.5Adapting a Lexicalized-Grammar Parser to Contrasting Domains
Xu et al. (2015)No77.74CCG Supertagging with a Recurrent Neural Network
Kummerfeld et al. (2010), with additional unlabeled dataNo76.1Faster Parsing by Supertagger Adaptation
Rimell and Clark (2008)No76.0Adapting a Lexicalized-Grammar Parser to Contrasting Domains

Supertagging

To mitigate sparsity, CCG supertaggers have traditionally been trained only on categories that occur 10 times or more in the CCGBank training data, which amounts to the 425 most frequent categories. In more recent work, using this threshold is becoming less common. In any case, supertagging evaluation is always measured for all supertags occurring in the test set. Models are evaluated based on token accuracy.

Constructive Supertagging

A constructive tagger models the internal structure of supertags rather than treating each supertag type as opaque (Kogkalidis et al., 2019). Supertags are constructed from minimal pieces (which for CCG are slashes and atomic categories) and there is no frequency cutoff.

CCGBank

Like for parsing, sections 2-21 are used for training, section 00 for development, and section 23 as in-domain test set.

ModelAccuracyPaper / Source
Kogkalidis and Moortgat (2022), constructive96.29Geometry-Aware Supertagging with Heterogeneous Dynamic Convolutions
Tian et al. (2020), non-constructive96.25Supertagging Combinatory Categorial Grammar with Attentive Graph Convolutional Networks
Prange et al. (2021), non-constructive96.22Supertagging the Long Tail with Tree-Structured Decoding of Complex Categories
Prange et al. (2021), constructive96.09Supertagging the Long Tail with Tree-Structured Decoding of Complex Categories
Clark et al. (2018)96.05Semi-Supervised Sequence Modeling with Cross-View Training
Bhargava and Penn (2020), constructive96.00Supertagging with CCG primitives
Lewis et al. (2016)94.7LSTM CCG Parsing
Vaswani et al. (2016)94.24Supertagging with LSTMs
Low supervision (Søgaard and Goldberg, 2016)93.26Deep multi-task learning with low-level tasks supervised at lower layers
Xu et al. (2015)93.00CCG Supertagging with a Recurrent Neural Network
Clark and Curran (2004)92.00The Importance of Supertagging for Wide-Coverage CCG Parsing (result from Lewis et al. (2016))

Rare and Unseen Supertags

ModelAcc on tags seen 1-9 timesAcc on unseen tagsPaper / Source
Bhargava and Penn (2020), constructive-5.00Supertagging with CCG primitives
Prange et al. (2021), constructive37.403.03Supertagging the Long Tail with Tree-Structured Decoding of Complex Categories
Prange et al. (2021), non-constructive23.170.00Supertagging the Long Tail with Tree-Structured Decoding of Complex Categories
Kogkalidis and Moortgat (2022), constructive34.454.55Geometry-Aware Supertagging with Heterogeneous Dynamic Convolutions

Wikipedia

ModelAccuracyPaper / Source
Prange et al. (2021), non-constructive92.54Supertagging the Long Tail with Tree-Structured Decoding of Complex Categories
Prange et al. (2021), constructive92.46Supertagging the Long Tail with Tree-Structured Decoding of Complex Categories
Xu et al. (2015)90.00CCG Supertagging with a Recurrent Neural Network

Conversion to PTB

There has been interest in converting CCG derivations to phrase structure parses for comparison with phrase structure parsers (since CCGBank is based on the PTB).

ModelAccuracyPaper / Source
Kummerfeld et al. (2012)96.30Robust Conversion of CCG Derivations to Phrase Structure Trees
Zhang et al. (2012)95.71A Machine Learning Approach to Convert CCGbank to Penn Treebank
Clark and Curran (2009)94.64Comparing the Accuracy of CCG and Penn Treebank Parsers