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# Improving a Strong Neural Parser with Conjunction-Specific Features

**Authors:** Jessica Ficler, [Yoav Goldberg](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/yoav-goldberg/) · **Year:** 2017 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 2, Short Papers **Link:** [aclanthology.org/E17-2055](https://aclanthology.org/E17-2055/) · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

[**5** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W2590742515) openalex · 2026-10-19[**4** citations in our library](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/cited-by/aclbulk-2017-ficler-improving-strong-neural-parser-conjunction/) of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read[Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 2, Short Papers](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/E17-2/)[licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/E17-2055/)
- [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/E17-2055.pdf)
- [DOI 10.18653/v1/e17-2055](https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/e17-2055)
- [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2590742515)

**Authors (2)**

1. [Jessica Ficler](https://openalex.org/A5062528125) [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/1899924) · h 5 · 394 citations · 9 works
2. [Yoav Goldberg](https://openalex.org/A5028476919) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6497-829X) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/79775260) · h 63 · 24540 citations · 401 works

Citations and author metrics from openalex (2026-10-19); authors with the same name are not always told apart.

## What it is about

Parsers are accurate overall but attach the conj relation poorly, even in simple sentences. The authors add features to the BIST transition parser (arc-hybrid, with a Kiperwasser and Goldberg scorer) that measure the symmetry of the two conjuncts: whether their head words share a lemma, suffix, capitalization or sentiment, and whether their POS match. The features are used only where the candidate attachment is a conjunction. On the Penn Treebank with Stanford dependencies, labelled attachment rises from 91.9 to 92.1 LAS, and the F1 on the conj relation with its head rises from 82.5 to 83.6. Most of the newly correct conj attachments involve a conjunction feature, while few of the cases the baseline gets right alone do. A reviewer's suggestion to add character-level morphology gave no meaningful change.

## Ideas

- I1. `en/src/parse.rs` feature template: add conjunct-symmetry features (lemma match, suffix match, capitalization match, UPOS match) for candidate conj attachments in the arc-standard perceptron; metric: conj Rel+Att F1 and LAS on EWT test.
- I2. `gparse` biaffine scorer: add the same pair features as an input to the arc score for `conj` candidates; metric: conj F1 on EWT dev, two seeds, against the current model.
- I3. `treeagree`: a gate rule that counts conj attachments between words of different UPOS (a symmetry violation) per 1k sentences in the silver corpus; use it as a check, not a fix.

## For Mova

The chapter is [24. Coordination and subordination](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/24-coordination-subordination/). The code is `en/src/parse.rs` (the feature set of the perceptron) and `gparse` (the arc scorer), with `treeagree` as the check. The paper's gain is about one point on conj F1, so measure on EWT test with the conj counts before claiming any LAS change.

## Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. [DOI 10.18653/v1/e17-2055](https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/e17-2055)

```
@inproceedings{ficler2017improving,
  title = {{Improving a Strong Neural Parser with Conjunction-Specific Features}},
  author = {Ficler, Jessica and Goldberg, Yoav},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 2, Short Papers},
  year = {2017},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/e17-2055},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/e17-2055}
}
```

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