Year: 2012
Type: article
Abstract: Syntactic representations based on word-to-word dependencies have a long-standing tradition in descriptive linguistics, and receive considerable interest in many applications. Nevertheless, dependency syntax has remained something of an island from a formal point of view. Moreover, most formalisms available for dependency grammar are restricted to projective analyses, and thus not able to support natural accounts of phenomena such as wh-movement and cross–serial dependencies. In this article we present a formalism for non-projective dependency grammar in the framework of linear context-free rewriting systems. A characteristic property of our formalism is a close correspondence between the non-projectivity of the dependency trees admitted by a grammar on the one hand, and the parsing complexity of the grammar on the other. We show that parsing with unrestricted grammars is intractable. We therefore study two constraints on non-projectivity, block-degree and well-nestedness. Jointly, these two constraints define a class of “mildly” non-projective dependency grammars that can be parsed in polynomial time. An evaluation on five dependency treebanks shows that these grammars have a good coverage of empirical data.
Source: Computational Linguistics
DOI: 10.1162/coli_a_00125
Author: Marco Kuhlmann
Institution: Uppsala University
Language: English
Subfield: Artificial Intelligence
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2116876762