Abstract

At this session of the NLIP Reading Group we’ll be discussing the following paper:

Joakim Nivre. 2005. Dependency grammar and dependency parsing. Technical Report, School of Mathematics and Systems Engineering, Växjö University.

Abstract: Despite a long and venerable tradition in descriptive linguistics, dependency grammar has until recently played a fairly marginal role both in theoretical linguistics and in natural language processing. The increasing interest in dependency-based representations in natural language parsing in recent years appears to be motivated both by the potential usefulness of bilexical relations in disambiguation and by the gains in efficiency that result from the more constrained parsing problem for these representations. In this paper, we will review the state of the art in dependency-based parsing, starting with the theoretical foundations of dependency grammar and moving on to consider both grammar-driven and data-driven methods for dependency parsing.

As this is a longer-than-usual paper, Laura and Andreas have provided the following reading suggestions:

Our purpose in presenting this technical report is to give an introduction to dependency grammars and how they are used in parsing. It is worth reading in its entirety, but we’d like to focus on pages 1-5 (intro and some definitions), 10-11 (notion of projectivity and syntactic vs semantic heads) and 19-24 (data-driven dependency parsing and conclusions).