To be incremental or not: PreTra and RBGParser evaluated on garden path sentences

Abstract

This study investigates the effect of incrementality on the accuracy of parsers on garden path sentences. We show that the incremental parser evaluated in this thesis achieves lower accuracies on garden path sentences than a nonincremental parser. We then explore one explanation for this worse accuracy of the incremental parser and we find two likely sources for error: either the scoring function, or the transition system is the culprit. We suggest further research to investigate which of of the two sources of error contribute the most.