Dependency grammar is an increasingly important grammar representation in computational linguistics, with a firm foundation in theoretical and descriptive linguistics. It is particularly well-suited for languages with relatively free word order and supports a transparent mapping from the string to a functor-argument representation needed for many computational applications. Dependency representations also are the new emerging standard for comparing the result of syntactic analysis across different grammar formalisms and parsing approaches.

This seminar will introduce the approaches to dependency parsing, existing implementations, and current research issues. Student projects will explore the training and evaluation of different parsing strategies, including the question of mapping existing treebank annotation schemes to dependency representations for training and testing of parsers.

Note that the following session plan is subject to change; it only constitutes the current state of our planning as the semester unfolds.

Nature of course and our expectations: This is a Pro-/Hauptseminar intended to provide an overview of the current approaches in this active research area. Each participant is expected to

Academic conduct and misconduct: Research is driven by discussion and free exchange of ideas, motivations, and perspectives. So you are encouraged to work in groups, discuss, and exchange ideas. At the same time, the foundation of the free exchange of ideas is that everyone is open about where they obtained which information. Concretely, this means you are expected to always make explicit when you’ve worked on something as a team – and keep in mind that being part of a team always means sharing the work.

For text you write, you always have to provide explicit references for any ideas or passages you reuse from somewhere else. Note that this includes text “found” on the web, where you should cite the url of the web site in case no more official publication is available.

Class etiquette: Please do not read or work on materials for other classes in our seminar. Come to class on time and do not pack up early. When our seminar meets in the computer lab, only use the computers when you are asked to do a specific activity – do not read email or browse the web. All portable electronic devices such as cell phones should be switched off for the entire length of the flight, oops, class. If for some reason, you must leave early or you have an important call coming in, or you have to miss class for an important reason, please let Detmar or Holger know before class.

References

Boyd, A., M. Dickinson & D. Meurers (2008). On Detecting Errors in Dependency Treebanks. Research on Language and Computation 6(2), 113–137. URL http://purl.org/dm/papers/boyd-et-al-08.html.

Carroll, J., G. Minnen & T. Briscoe (2003). Parser evaluation: using a grammatical relation annotation scheme. In A. Abeillé (ed.), Treebanks: Building and Using Parsed Corpora, Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Covington, M. A. (2001). A Fundamental Algorithm for Dependency Parsing. In J. A. Miller & J. W. Smith (eds.), Proceedings of the 39th Annual ACM Southeast Conference. pp. 95—-102. URL http://www.stanford.edu/~mjkay/covington.pdf.

Debusmann, R. (2006). Extensible Dependency Grammar: A Modular Grammar Formalism Based on Multigraph Dimension. Ph.D. thesis, Universität des Saarlandes.

Dickinson, M. & M. Ragheb (2009). Dependency Annotation for Learner Corpora. In Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories (TLT-8). Milan, Italy. URL http://jones.ling.indiana.edu/~mdickinson/papers/dickinson-ragheb09.html.

Foth, K. A., M. Daum & W. Menzel (2004). A broad-coverage parser for German based on defeasible constraints. In In KONVENS 2004, Beiträge zur 7. Konferenz zur Verarbeitung natürlicher Sprache. pp. 45–52. URL http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.59.6728&rep=rep1&type=pdf.

Hall, J., J. Nilsson & J. Nivre (2009). Homepage of MaltParser. URL http://maltparser.org.

Kübler, S., R. McDonald & J. Nivre (2009). Dependency Parsing. In G. Hirst (ed.), Synthesis Lectures on Human Language Technologies, Morgan & Claypool Publishers.

McDonald, R. & J. Baldridge (2009). Homepage of MSTParser. URL http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~strctlrn/MSTParser/MSTParser.html.

McDonald, R., K. Lerman & F. Pereira (2006). Multilingual dependency analysis with a two-stage discriminative parser. In CoNLL-X ’06: Proceedings of the Tenth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning. Morristown, NJ, USA: Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 216–220. URL http://papers.ldc.upenn.edu/CONLL2006/Multilingual-depend-analysis_McDonald+_2006.pdf.

Mel’čuk, I. (1988). Dependency Syntax: Theory and Practice. State University of New York Press.

Menzel, W. (2010). CDG homepage. URL http://nats-www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/view/CDG/WebHome.

Nivre, J. (2005). Pseudo-Projective Dependency Parsing. In Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. URL http://w3.msi.vxu.se/~nivre/papers/acl05.pdf.

Nivre, J., J. Nilsson, J. Hall, A. Chanev, G. Eryigit, S. Kübler, S. Marinov & E. Marsi (2007). MaltParser: A Language-Independent System for Data-Driven Dependency Parsing. Natural Language Engineering 13(1), 1–41. URL http://w3.msi.vxu.se/~nivre/papers/nle07.pdf.

Schneider, G. (2008). Hybrid long-distance functional dependency parsing. Ph.D. thesis, University of Zurich. URL https://www.zora.uzh.ch/7188/.

Versley, Y. (2005). Parser Evaluation across Text Types Fourth Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories. In Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories (TLT-05). Barcelona, Spain. URL http://www.versley.de/versley_tlt05.pdf.