10
As a proponent of construction grammar, I am perhaps the wrong person to answer this. But I can see at least two non-computational advantages of a constituency parsing:
It lets you directly encode generalizations about the individual components that make up a clause or sentence. Your constituency tree does not take advantage of it (perhaps being influenced ...
7
I do not think that Chomsky ever cited Tesnière in a meaningful way, because if he had, we would know about it. I state this as the main translator of Tesnière's work Elements of structural syntax to English. Consider the question from the point of view of the tremendous impact that Chomsky's ideas have had on the linguistics world. Had Chomsky ever cited ...
5
I hope I correctly understand the question as being a general one, rather than particularly about automated parsing.
Here's what I was taught in Syntax and believed ever since (but maybe I missed some advances of the dependencies framework).
In general: Constituency, but not dependency, shows units on which syntax operates. I.e., constituency reflects the ...
5
My answer is partially motivated by Dominik Lukes's answer and some of the things I read in the comments that follow it.
Chunking is a kind of constituency parsing. The theoretical motivation for chunking comes from constituency parsing, à la NP, VP, etc. Though chunking is considered to be only "shallow" parsing, i.e. not the proper kind, it is still ...
4
I don't think that constituency is necessary, although I acknowledge the notion of "constituent" (I just don't think it's the central notion on which language structure is built). Of course, I have to admit that many linguists seem to view the constituent as an indispensable tool.
My impression is that rather than questioning the necessity of constituency,...
4
Honestly, because you are asking at such a high level--just "dependency grammar" or "constituency grammar", rather than a specific grammatical theory, this question is likely not really answerable. That being said, I think you have some assumptions in your question which have lead to your confusion.
It is usually assumed that this specific type of structure ...
3
Yes, cognitive and construction grammars do take ambiguity into account. However, they have to give up a lot of the formal properties of traditional constituency and dependency grammars.
It resolves the particular ambiguities you mention by not having a notion of things like constituents, dependents or complements. It simply treats all surface ...
3
I've just seen your question, I don't know whether it's still relevant, but here you have a paper that describes how to projectivise a dependency tree. http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P05-1013
3
The question is too broad to answer completely (to start with, it presupposes a shibboleth to distinguish formal theories of syntax), but the answer is easy for minimalism.
The comment in the question does not apply to minimalist syntax in that minimalist syntax does not assume that the leaves of a syntax tree must necessarily host words. On the other hand, ...
3
There is no good introductory textbook on dependency grammar (DG) in English that I am aware of; certainly nothing at the level of Linda Thomas' book, which is really very basic. The books linked to in the question are not appropriate: Kahane's book is a collection of essays that are not accessible to aspiring linguists. Liu's book is in Chinese. There are, ...
3
I suppose you mean a rule-based parser since nobody would think of developing his own statistical parser (there are so many good open-source libraries).
Building a parser is quite complicated. The best way is to have a context-free grammar (CF parsing is trivial) and build up the dependency structures via constraint rules. This is how LFG works, whose f-...
3
Some remarks are necessary before answering such a question. CFGs have been an important step in the history of formal grammars, but it is not exactly the example we want to follow in DG and in natural language modelling in general. CFGs are string rewriting systems, that is, grammars that generate sets of strings of words. But to speak English is not to be ...
3
The formalizations of dependency theory exist. In fact I have a colleague who specializes in mathematical formalizations of principles of syntax, and he is more a DG guy (dependency grammar) than a PSG guy (phrase structure grammar). But he and I disagree about the value of the formalizations that he employs. I do not understand his formalizations and see ...
3
The context free rewrite rules - as associated most with early Chomskyan syntax - can easily be reworked in terms of dependency: G = (T, R), where T is the set of terminals and R is the set of rewrite rules. The distinction between nonterminal symbols (V) and terminal symbols (T) disappears, only terminals remaining. If one needs a start symbol, it would ...
3
You might want to have a look at LFG, they use X' Theory extended with an additional "lexocentric" category S to accommodate nonconfigurational phrase structures.
3
Thanks for your question. This example reflects a larger problem in grammaticizing language. Roughly speaking there are two approaches: Generative and descriptive. A parser is generative, presupposing that there are elementary and globally correct grammar rules whom all sentences in a language ideally abide by. Exceptions are accepted but are treated as “...
3
Yes, your analyses are correct. The adjectives interesting, very happy, and green are object predicatives, that is, they are predications over the object each time (not over the subject). The dependency grammar analysis of object predicatives is likely to posit a flat, tertiary branching structure, e.g.
The flatness of these structures is suggestive of the ...
3
The answers to the four questions posed are certainly going to vary based on the expert consulted. Phrase structure grammarians view aspects of word order differently from dependency grammarians. I will take each of the questions one at a time:
Question 1
What are the main differences between Meaning-Text Theory (MTT) and phrase structure grammars.
The ...
2
Projectivity is a concept that applies to both dependency grammars (DGs) and constituency grammars (CGs). The extent to which it is applicable to both approaches to syntax is discussed and illustrated with numerous trees here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discontinuity_%28linguistics%29
The term itself, i.e. projectivity, was introduced in the 1960s in ...
2
Regarding your second question, Michael Collins gives a nice explanation in his MOOC on NLP, summarized in this slide:
In short:
with the usual CKY algorithm in PCFG parsing, which is based on dynamic programming and yields a constituency-based tree, you have a time complexity of O(n^3 * G^3) as the dynamic programming algorithm is also looking for which ...
2
There is a rather simple answer to this question. This answer is that conversion from dependency to constituency is not really possible, at least not in the way imagined. Dependency structures are usually flatter than the corresponding constituency structures. What this means is that when one translates from dependency to constituency, the result is a rather ...
2
This book is good though quite old: The Meaning of the Sentence in its Semantic and Pragmatic Aspects
Geert-Jan Kruijff gave a nice course at ESSLLI: DG, and you can google up his papers on DG.
XDG is one of the best dependency formalisms: XDG
2
spaCy.io has a nice high-accuracy lightweight parser.
If you only need English then it is a good choice.
2
Dependency parsing is constraint solving. I recommend you have a look at XDG, which is the only formally precise dependency grammar approach I'm aware of.
2
No. The annotation choices referred to in the question that are currently encountered in in some dependency treebanks are not well motivated linguistically.
The question is centrally concerned with the structural analysis of simple sentences like Frank is hungry. Should the subject Frank be construed as a dependent of the copular verb is or of the ...
2
There are a number of possibilities for the X-bar analysis of the phrase so little. A central choice one has to make concerns viewing little as an adjective or as a derived noun, that is, as a noun derived from an adjective. My favored analysis would be to view it as the latter. Given this decision, the next decision one has to make concerns the status of so:...
2
I am part of the team that developed the SUD syntactic format mentioned by Tim in his answer. The other participants are Sylvain Kahane, Kim Gerdès and Bruno Guillaume.
The third analysis presented by Tim is exactly the syntactic annotation of the sentence in SUD.
I think it is not necessary to introduce an ellipsis to be consistent with the usual syntactic ...
2
First of all, it should be noted that in nearly all generative theories--even in ones which generate subjects inside the VP--the subject practically never stays there for long. Subjects generally move upwards into a position where they can receive Case; by most X' accounts, they move up into SpecTP (or SpecIP, etc.).
This is what BillJ's response is ...
1
To my mind, the canonical "generative but non-derivational" work is the stuff that Michael Brody did.
Have a look at his book Lexico-Logical Form, which is a great and detailed exploration of an alternative approach to "minimalism", and after that find his work on "Mirror Syntax" (I think it appeared in Linguistic Inquiry circa 2000).
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
