Discontinuous dependency parsing of free and fixed word order: Work in progress
Michael A. Covington · 1994
The dependency--based free--word--order parsing algorithm of Covington (1987, 1990, 1992) can be extended to handle partly or completely fixed word order, while preserving its psychologically realistic preference for near attachment. By adding predictivity, this algorithm can be adapted to parse left--branching and right--branching structures in less stack space than center--embedded structures, just as the human parser appears to do. 1 Introduction Most parsing algorithms assume that words occur in a fixed order, and that the input string can be divided into continuous substrings which are constituents. Discontinuous dependency parsing (DDP; Covington 1987, 1990, 1992) makes no such assumptions. It treats free word order as the simplest case, and treats restrictions on word order as additional constraints. Thus, DDP has an advantage in parsing languages with extensive word order variability. In this paper I briefly note how to extend DDP to handle fixed as well as variable word order...