Papers › Transition-based Parsing with Stack-Transformers

Transition-based Parsing with Stack-Transformers

20 Oct 2020Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2020arXiv:2010.10669archive 2025-07-28

Ramon Fernandez Astudillo, Miguel Ballesteros, Tahira Naseem, Austin Blodgett, Radu Florian

Modeling the parser state is key to good performance in transition-based parsing. Recurrent Neural Networks considerably improved the performance of transition-based systems by modelling the global state, e.g. stack-LSTM parsers, or local state modeling of contextualized features, e.g. Bi-LSTM parsers. Given the success of Transformer architectures in recent parsing systems, this work explores modifications of the sequence-to-sequence Transformer architecture to model either global or local parser states in transition-based parsing. We show that modifications of the cross attention mechanism of the Transformer considerably strengthen performance both on dependency and Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) parsing tasks, particularly for smaller models or limited training data.

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Code

IBM/transition-amr-parser officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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Tasks

AMR ParsingAbstract Meaning Representation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
AMR Parsing LDC2017T10 stack-Transformer (IBM) Smatch 79.0 #19 of 27 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutLabel SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTransformer

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