Dependency Parsing in Bangla

Abstract

A grammar-driven dependency parsing has been attempted for Bangla (Bengali). The free-word order nature of the language makes the development of an accurate parser very difficult. The Paninian grammatical model has been used to tackle the free-word order problem. The approach is to simplify complex and compound sentences and then to parse simple sentences by satisfying the Karaka demands of the Demand Groups (Verb Groups). Finally, parsed structures are rejoined with appropriate links and Karaka labels. The parser has been trained with a Treebank of 1000 annotated sentences and then evaluated with un-annotated test data of 150 sentences. The evaluation shows that the proposed approach achieves 90.32% and 79.81% accuracies for unlabeled and labeled attachments, respectively.