Dependency Grammars and ContextFree （依赖语法和上下文无关）.pdfVIP

Steven Abney University of T¨ubingen The question arises from time to time what the relation is between depen- dency grammars (DG’s) and phrase-structure grammars. A classic paper by Gaifman [1] would appear to have laid the issue to rest, by proving that depen- dency grammars are a special case of context-free grammars (CFG’s). Gaifman proves that dependency grammars are equivalent to a proper subset of phrase- structure grammars, those of degree 1, which I will dub d1-CFG’s. (As degree cannot be explained in a few words, I will leave it undefined for the moment.) Under a weaker notion of correspondence, which Gaifman attributes to Hays [2], dependency grammars correspond to finite-degree CFG’s, which represent a larger subset of CFG’s, but a proper subset nonetheless. I submit, however, that Gaifman correlates DG’s with a proper subset of CFG’s only by suppressing the essential property of DG’s, namely, their head- edness. I would like to show that, if we take headedness seriously, we are led to the conclusion that DG’s and CFG’s both represent equivalence classes of what I will call headed context-free grammars (HCFG’s), but that neither DG’s nor CFG’s subsume the other. Nonetheless, Gaifman’s result is preserved in a different form, in that the equivalence classes defined by CFG’s include all HCFG’s, but the equivalence classes defined by DG’s include only finite-degree HCFG’s. In particular, each HCFG has a unique characteristic grammar, a CFG that abstracts away from the choice of heads in the HCFG. Each HCFG also has a unique projection grammar, a DG representing the dependencies among pro- jections in the headed trees generated by the HCFG. The projection grammar abstracts away from the order in which dependent project