[Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/lingbulk-2009-goldberg-hebrew-dependency-parsing-initial-results/)

[home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [docs](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/) / [papers](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/) / [Modern Hebrew](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/he/) / Hebrew Dependency Parsing: Initial Results

# Hebrew Dependency Parsing: Initial Results

**Authors:** [Yoav Goldberg](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/yoav-goldberg/); [Michael Elhadad](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/michael-elhadad/) · **Year:** 2009 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Parsing Technologies (IWPT 2009) **Link:** [aclanthology.org/W09-3819](https://aclanthology.org/W09-3819/) · library `lingbulk-2009-goldberg-hebrew-dependency-parsing-initial-results` · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) (ACL Anthology, before 2016) — summary only

[**20** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W2022421452) openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14[**11** citations in our library](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/cited-by/lingbulk-2009-goldberg-hebrew-dependency-parsing-initial-results/) of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read[Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Parsing Technologies (IWPT'09)](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/W09-38/)[licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/W09-3819/)
- [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/W09-3819.pdf)
- [DOI 10.3115/1697236.1697261](https://doi.org/10.3115/1697236.1697261)
- [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2022421452)

**Authors (2)**

1. [Yoav Goldberg](https://openalex.org/A5028476919) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6497-829X) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/2089067) · h 59 · 23282 citations · 401 works
2. [Michael Elhadad](https://openalex.org/A5013658527) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5629-2351) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/1754680) · h 25 · 3571 citations · 137 works

Citations and author metrics from openalex-snapshot (2026-10-14); authors with the same name are not always told apart.

## What it is about

The authors derive a Hebrew dependency treebank (DepTB) from version 2 of the Hebrew constituency treebank. The conversion makes conjunctions the head of coordinated structures, prepositions the head of prepositional phrases and relativizers the head of clauses, and it fixes some errors found in the source. They train two parsers, MSTParser (first and second order) and MaltParser, on sections 2–12 and test unlabelled attachment on section 1. With gold segmentation and tags, the best model (second order, full lexicon) reaches 84.31% and MaltParser 80.77%. With automatic segmentation and tagging, the best falls to 76.38%. Graph-based models do better, partly because coordination needs many attachment decisions to wait for the final conjunction. Morphological features add little when the morphology is gold. Their metric counts a predicted pair as wrong when one of its segments is missing from the gold parse.

## Ideas

- I1. Report two numbers for every parser run, one on gold segmentation and one on the automatic segmenter, and count a predicted segment absent from gold as an error. This makes a segmenter gain or loss visible in the parse score.
- I2. Test the conjunction-as-head representation as an option in the Modern Hebrew UD conversion, and measure it on coordinated clauses separately. Their coordination examples (figures 1 and 2) are the test cases: the subject hangs on the coordinator, not on a verb.
- I3. Run an ablation on `gparse`: with and without morphological features, and with rare lexical items replaced by an unknown token at thresholds 20 and 100. The paper finds that a second-order graph model with pruned lexicon can beat the full one. Check this on Mova's data before adopting it, and keep the full run as the control.

## For Mova

I1 is a reporting rule for `tools/hbo` evaluation. I2 goes into [11. Modern Hebrew in Universal Dependencies](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/he/11-ud-analysis/) and [7. Syntax](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/he/07-syntax/). I3 is a `gparse` experiment that must run twice with identical results before any claim.

Topics: [Dependency parsing](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/topics/dependency-parsing/)

## Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. [DOI 10.3115/1697236.1697261](https://doi.org/10.3115/1697236.1697261)

```
@inproceedings{goldberg2009hebrew,
  title = {{Hebrew Dependency Parsing: Initial Results}},
  author = {Goldberg, Yoav and Elhadad, Michael},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Parsing Technologies (IWPT'09)},
  year = {2009},
  doi = {10.3115/1697236.1697261},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/1697236.1697261}
}
```

- [← previous Word-Based or Morpheme-Based? Annotation Strategies for Modern Hebrew Clitics](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/lingbulk-2008-tsarfaty-word-based-or-morpheme-based/)
- [next → A Morphologically-Analyzed CHILDES Corpus of Hebrew](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/lingbulk-2010-nir-morphologically-analyzed-childes-corpus-hebrew/)
- [↑ back to Modern Hebrew](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/he/)

## References

14 references, 5 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

1. Meni Adler. 2007. Hebrew Morphological Disambiguation: An Unsupervised Stochastic Word-based Approach. Ph.D. thesis, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Meni+Adler%2E+2007%2E+Hebrew+Morphological+Disambiguation%3A+An+Unsupervised+Stochastic+Word%2Dbased+Approach%2E+Ph%2ED%2E+thesis%2C+Ben%2DGurion+University+of+the+Negev%2C+Beer%2DSheva%2C+Israel%2E)
2. Sabine Buchholz and Marsi Erwin. 2006. CoNLL-X shared task on multilingual dependency parsing. In Proc. of CoNLL. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Sabine+Buchholz+and+Marsi+Erwin%2E+2006%2E+CoNLL%2DX+shared+task+on+multilingual+dependency+parsing%2E+In+Proc%2E+of+CoNLL%2E) [our card](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/parsers-2006-buchholz-conll-x-shared-task-multilingual/)
3. Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Bill MacCartney, and Christopher D. Manning. 2006. Generating typed dependency parses from phrase structure parses. In Proc. of LREC. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Marie%2DCatherine+de+Marneffe%2C+Bill+MacCartney%2C+and+Christopher+D%2E+Manning%2E+2006%2E+Generating+typed+dependency+parses+from+phrase+structure+parses%2E+In+Proc%2E+of+LREC%2E) [our card](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/map-2006-marneffe-generating-typed-dependency-parses-phrase/)
4. Yoav Goldberg, Meni Adler, and Michael Elhadad. 2006. Noun phrase chunking in hebrew: Influence of lexical and morphological features. In Proc. of COLING/ACL. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Yoav+Goldberg%2C+Meni+Adler%2C+and+Michael+Elhadad%2E+2006%2E+Noun+phrase+chunking+in+hebrew%3A+Influence+of+lexical+and+morphological+features%2E+In+Proc%2E+of+COLING%2FACL%2E) [our card](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/aclbulk-2006-goldberg-noun-phrase-chunking-hebrew-influence/)
5. Yoav Goldberg, Meni Adler, and Michael Elhadad. 2008. EM can find pretty good HMM POS-Taggers (when given a good start). In Proc. of ACL. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Yoav+Goldberg%2C+Meni+Adler%2C+and+Michael+Elhadad%2E+2008%2E+EM+can+find+pretty+good+HMM+POS%2DTaggers+%28when+given+a+good+start%29%2E+In+Proc%2E+of+ACL%2E)
6. Yoav Golderg, Reut Tsarfaty, Meni Adler, and Michael Elhadad. 2009. Enhancing unlexicalized parsing performance using a wide coverage lexicon, fuzzy tag-set mapping, and EM-HMM-based lexical probabilities. In Proc of EACL. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Yoav+Golderg%2C+Reut+Tsarfaty%2C+Meni+Adler%2C+and+Michael+Elhadad%2E+2009%2E+Enhancing+unlexicalized+parsing+performance+using+a+wide+coverage+lexicon%2C+fuzzy+tag%2Dset+mapping%2C+and+EM%2DHMM%2Dbased+lexical+probabili)
7. Noemie Guthmann, Yuval Krymolowski, Adi Milea, and Yoad Winter. 2009. Automatic annotation of morpho-syntactic dependencies in a modern hebrew treebank. In Proc of TLT. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Noemie+Guthmann%2C+Yuval+Krymolowski%2C+Adi+Milea%2C+and+Yoad+Winter%2E+2009%2E+Automatic+annotation+of+morpho%2Dsyntactic+dependencies+in+a+modern+hebrew+treebank%2E+In+Proc+of+TLT%2E)
8. Ryan McDonald and Joakim Nivre. 2007. Characterizing the errors of data-driven dependency parsing models. In Proc. of EMNLP. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Ryan+McDonald+and+Joakim+Nivre%2E+2007%2E+Characterizing+the+errors+of+data%2Ddriven+dependency+parsing+models%2E+In+Proc%2E+of+EMNLP%2E) [our card](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/missing4-2007-mcdonald-characterizing-errors-data-driven-dependency/)
9. Ryan McDonald. 2006. Discriminative Training and Spanning Tree Algorithms for Dependency Parsing. Ph.D. thesis, University of Pennsylvania. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Ryan+McDonald%2E+2006%2E+Discriminative+Training+and+Spanning+Tree+Algorithms+for+Dependency+Parsing%2E+Ph%2ED%2E+thesis%2C+University+of+Pennsylvania%2E)
10. Joakim Nivre, Johan Hall, and Jens Nillson. 2006. MaltParser: A data-driven parser-generator for dependency parsing. In Proc. of LREC. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Joakim+Nivre%2C+Johan+Hall%2C+and+Jens+Nillson%2E+2006%2E+MaltParser%3A+A+data%2Ddriven+parser%2Dgenerator+for+dependency+parsing%2E+In+Proc%2E+of+LREC%2E)
11. Joakim Nivre, Johan Hall, Sandra Kubler, Ryan Mc-Donald, Jens Nilsson, Sebastian Riedel, and Deniz Yuret. 2007. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Joakim+Nivre%2C+Johan+Hall%2C+Sandra+Kubler%2C+Ryan+Mc%2DDonald%2C+Jens+Nilsson%2C+Sebastian+Riedel%2C+and+Deniz+Yuret%2E+2007%2E)
12. The CoNLL 2007 shared task on dependency parsing. In Proc. of the EMNLP-CoNLL. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=The+CoNLL+2007+shared+task+on+dependency+parsing%2E+In+Proc%2E+of+the+EMNLP%2DCoNLL%2E)
13. Reut Tsarfaty and Khalil Sima’an. 2008. Relational-realizational parsing. In Proc. of CoLING, August. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Reut+Tsarfaty+and+Khalil+Sima%E2%80%99an%2E+2008%2E+Relational%2Drealizational+parsing%2E+In+Proc%2E+of+CoLING%2C+August%2E)
14. Reut Tsarfaty. 2006. Integrated morphological and syntactic disambiguation for modern hebrew. In Proceedings of ACL-SRW. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Reut+Tsarfaty%2E+2006%2E+Integrated+morphological+and+syntactic+disambiguation+for+modern+hebrew%2E+In+Proceedings+of+ACL%2DSRW%2E) [our card](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/aclbulk-2006-tsarfaty-integrated-morphological-syntactic-disambiguation-modern/)