Abstract

We present new experiments that transfer techniques from Probabilistic Context-free Grammars with Latent Annotations (PCFG-LA) to two grammar formalisms for discontinuous parsing: linear context-free rewriting systems and hybrid grammars. In particular, Dirichlet priors during EM training, ensemble models, and a new nonterminal scheme for hybrid grammars are evaluated. We find that our grammars are more accurate than previous approaches based on discontinuous grammar formalisms and early instances of the discriminative models but inferior to recent discriminative parsers.