Dependency Structures And Lexicalized Grammars

Since 2002, FoLLI has awarded an annual prize for outstanding dissertations in the fields of Logic, Language and Information. This book is based on the PhD thesis of Marco Kuhlmann, joint winner of the E.W. Beth dissertation award in 2008. Kuhlmann’s thesis lays new theoretical foundations for the study of non-projective dependency grammars. These grammars are becoming increasingly important for approaches to statistical parsing in computational linguistics that deal with free word order and long-distance dependencies. The author provides new formal tools to define and understand dependency grammars, presents two new dependency language hierarchies with polynomial parsing algorithms, establishes the practical significance of these hierarchies through corpus studies, and links his work to the phrase-structure grammar tradition through an equivalence result with tree-adjoining grammars. The work bridges the gaps between linguistics and theoretical computer science, between theoretical and empirical approaches in computational linguistics, and between previously disconnected strands of formal language research.

Since 2002, FoLLI has awarded an annual prize for outstanding dissertations in the fields of Logic, Language and Information. This book is based on the PhD thesis of Marco Kuhlmann, joint winner of the E.W. Beth dissertation award in 2008. Kuhlmann's thesis lays new theoretical foundations for the study of non-projective dependency grammars. These grammars are becoming increasingly important for approaches to statistical parsing in computational linguistics that deal with free word order and long-distance dependencies. The author provides new formal tools to define and understand dependency grammars, presents two new dependency language hierarchies with polynomial parsing algorithms, establishes the practical significance of these hierarchies through corpus studies, and links his work to the phrase-structure grammar tradition through an equivalence result with tree-adjoining grammars. The work bridges the gaps between linguistics and theoretical computer science, between theoretical and empirical approaches in computational linguistics, and between previously disconnected strands of formal language research.

This book develops a formal theory of dependency structures and shows how combining them with a regular means of composition yields copious hierarchies of ever more powerful dependency languages. It also classifies several relevant grammatical formalisms.

This volume offers the reader a unique possibility to obtain a concise introduction to dependency linguistics and to learn about the current state of the art in the field. It unites the revised and extended versions of the linguistically-oriented papers to the First International Conference on Dependency Linguistics held in Barcelona. The contributions range from the discussion of definitional challenges of dependency at different levels of the linguistic model, its role beyond the classical grammatical description, and its annotation in dependency treebanks to concrete analyses of various cross-linguistic phenomena of syntax in its interplay with phonetics, morphology, and semantics, including phenomena for which classical simple phrase-structure based models have proven to be unsatisfactory. The volume will be thus of interest to both experts and newcomers to the field of dependency linguistics and its computational applications.

Dependency analysis is increasingly used in computational linguistics and cognitive science. Surprisingly, compared with studies based on phrase structures, quantitative methods and dependency structure are rarely integrated in research.This is the first book that collects original contributions which quantitatively analyze dependency structures across different languages and text genres.

Dependency grammar (DG) is an approach to the syntax of natural languages with a long and venerable tradition, yet awareness of its potential to serve as a basis for principled analyses of natural language syntax is minimal due to the predominance of phrase structure grammar (PSG). This book presents a DG of English with two main goals in mind. The first is to make the principles of dependency syntax accessible to a general audience so that the novice linguist as well as the seasoned syntactician becomes fully aware of what makes DG unique as an approach to the study of natural language syntax. The second is to present and develop a version of DG that then serves as a principled basis for the investigation of central areas of the syntax of English, such as long-distance dependencies, coordination, ellipsis, valency, etc. An overarching theme in all this is that DG is simple compared to PSG, yet despite this simplicity, it is quite effective at shedding light on the nature of syntactic phenomena.

This book explores the adaptation of cognitive processes to limited resources. It deals with resource-bounded and resource-adaptive cognitive processes in human information processing and human-machine systems plus the related technology transfer issues.

This work presents the first sustained examination of Dependency Syntax. In clear and stimulating analyses Mel'cuk promotes syntactic description in terms of dependency rather than in terms of more familiar phrase-structure. The notions of dependency relations and dependency structure are introduced and substantiated, and the advantages of dependency representation are demonstrated by applying it to a number of popular linguistic problems, e.g. grammatical subject and ergative construction. A wide array of linguistic data is used - the well-known (Dyirbal), the less known (Lezgian), and the more recent (Alutor). Several "exotic" cases of Russian are discussed to show how dependency can be used to solve difficult technical problems. The book is not only formal and rigorous, but also strongly theory-oriented and data-based. Special attention is paid to linguistic terminology, specifically to its logical consistency. The dependency formalism is presented within the framework of a new semantics-oriented general linguistic theory, Meaning-Text theory.

Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) is a nontransformational theory of linguistic structure, first developed in the 1970s by Joan Bresnan and Ronald M. Kaplan, which assumes that language is best described and modeled by parallel structures representing different facets of linguistic organization and information, related by means of functional correspondences. This volume has five parts. Part I, Overview and Introduction, provides an introduction to core syntactic concepts and representations. Part II, Grammatical Phenomena, reviews LFG work on a range of grammatical phenomena or constructions. Part III, Grammatical modules and interfaces, provides an overview of LFG work on semantics, argument structure, prosody, information structure, and morphology. Part IV, Linguistic disciplines, reviews LFG work in the disciplines of historical linguistics, learnability, psycholinguistics, and second language learning. Part V, Formal and computational issues and applications, provides an overview of computational and formal properties of the theory, implementations, and computational work on parsing, translation, grammar induction, and treebanks. Part VI, Language families and regions, reviews LFG work on languages spoken in particular geographical areas or in particular language families. The final section, Comparing LFG with other linguistic theories, discusses LFG work in relation to other theoretical approaches.