Course Description

Throughout computational and mathematical linguistics we can observe a revived interest in dependency grammar. The goal of the course is to give an up-to-date insight into recent work on the formalization of, and computation with, dependency grammars.

We plan to start with a brief overview of the historical development of dependency grammar, and the current use of dependency-based notions in symbolic and statistical computational linguistics. Thereafter we discuss recent DG formalizations (e.g. Bröker, Duchier et al, Kahane et al, Kruijff, Rambow et al), and computational approaches (e.g. Collins, Duchier, Milward).

Ideally, students take home knowledge of the basic notions of dependency grammar, and how these notions can be used advantageously in various applications. The discussion of recent formal frameworks should serve as an entry to the literature. The discussion of computational approaches will examine the challenges in DG processing (e.g. arising from free word-order and discontinuous constituents), and how they can be addressed effectively by various methods (statistical [Collins], constraint programming [Duchier]).