In this paper, we show that significant improvements in the accuracy of well-known transition-based parsers can be obtained, without sacrificing efficiency, by enriching the parsers with simple transitions that act on buffer nodes. First, we show how adding a specific transition to create either a left or right arc of length one between the first two buffer nodes produces improvements in the accuracy of Nivre's arc-eager projective parser on a number of datasets from the CoNLL-X shared task. Then, we show that accuracy can also be improved by adding transitions involving the topmost stack node and the second buffer node (allowing a limited form of non-projectivity). None of these transitions has a negative impact on the computational complexity of the algorithm. Although the experiments in this paper use the arc-eager parser, the approach is generic enough to be applicable to any stack-based dependency parser.
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