---
title: "Simpler but More Accurate Semantic Dependency — Dozat 2018"
description: "Semantic dependency schemes represent meaning-oriented relations between words as directed acyclic graphs rather than trees."
authors: ["Timothy Dozat", "Christopher D. Manning"]
year: 2018
venue: "Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/P18-2077/"
doi: "10.18653/v1/p18-2077"
licence: "CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/dozat-2018-simpler-but-more-accurate-semantic/"
---
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# Simpler but More Accurate Semantic Dependency Parsing

**Authors:** [Timothy Dozat](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/timothy-dozat/), [Christopher D. Manning](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/christopher-d-manning/) · **Year:** 2018 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers) · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/P18-2077/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/P18-2077.pdf) · [DOI 10.18653/v1/p18-2077](https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/p18-2077) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2799072540)

**Citations:** 159 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) · [112](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/dozat-2018-simpler-but-more-accurate-semantic/cited-by/) in our library, of the 140884 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
Semantic dependency schemes represent meaning-oriented relations between words as directed acyclic graphs rather than trees. This lets a word such as a shared subject attach to several heads. Most parsers, however, are built to output trees. Starting from the biaffine BiLSTM parser that Dozat and Manning (2017) designed for syntax, the authors make only small changes so it can produce graphs:

- The MST decoding step is removed.
- Softmax is replaced with sigmoid cross-entropy, so each possible edge is scored independently.
- A separate labeler assigns a relation to each predicted edge, and the two losses are balanced by an interpolation weight.

They evaluate on the three SemEval 2014/2015 formalisms built on the Penn Treebank: DM, PAS and PSD. Testing covers in-domain WSJ and out-of-domain Brown data. The basic model already surpasses the more complex multitask system of Peng et al. (2017). Adding character-level and lemma embeddings widens that lead. Ablation studies suggest that careful tuning of sizes and dropout matters more than elaborate architecture. The result argues that graph-based parsers adapt naturally to different dependency structures.

## Key points
- The basic system beats the previous state of the art (PTS17 Freda3) by 0.6% labeled F1. The +Char +Lemma version beats it by 1.9%, reaching 86.3 average out-of-domain LF1 and 89.5 in-domain.
- In-domain LF1 for the best model is 93.7 on DM, 93.9 on PAS and 81.0 on PSD. PAS gains little from lemma or character embeddings, possibly because it is close to a ceiling.
- The setup uses a 3-layer BiLSTM with 600 units, 100-dimensional GloVe vectors projected to 125 dimensions, and a loss interpolation weight λ = .025. Training runs at roughly 300 sequences per second and parsing at about 1,000 per second on an nVidia Titan X.
- The authors trained twenty DM models per variant. Removing the hidden FNN layers or using a diagonal tensor in the edge classifier significantly lowers accuracy. Choosing bilinear versus biaffine classifiers makes little difference.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

Fields: [Natural language processing](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/nlp/)

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

## Institutions

- [Stanford University](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/stanford-university/) — University, Stanford, United States · 248 works · 214 804 citations

## Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{dozat2018simpler,
  title = {{Simpler but More Accurate Semantic Dependency Parsing}},
  author = {Dozat, Timothy and Manning, Christopher D.},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)},
  year = {2018},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/p18-2077},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/p18-2077}
}
```

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