Does Traversal Order Matter? A Systematic Study of Tree Traversal Methods in Transformer Grammars
Transformer Grammars (TGs) enhance language modeling by incorporating syntactic tree structures. Despite the potentially significant impact on model performance of how syntactic trees are linearized in TGs, existing studies rely solely on Depth-First Traversal (DFT) for linearization. In this paper, we expand the traversal design space by exploring Breadth-First Traversal (BFT) and a novel hybrid traversal strategy, Production-Rule Traversal (PRT), which combines the structural lookahead of BFT with the early lexical generation of DFT. We integrate these traversal methods with varying tree configurations and masking strategies, and empirically evaluate their performance on language modeli...
| Authors | Zongru Liu, Pengyu Ji, Pengcheng Wang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 15 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 15 June 2026 |
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