Parsing without (much) phrase structure
Michael B. Kac, Alexis Manaster-Ramer · 1986
Approaches to NL syntax conform in varying degrees to the older relational/dependency model, (essentially that assumed in traditional grammar), which treats a sentence as a group of words united by various relations, and the newer constituent model. Some modern approaches have nonetheless involved shifts away from essentially constituent-based models of the sort associated with Bloomfield and Chomsky to more relation-based ones (e.g. case grammar, relational grammar, daughter-dependency and word grammar, corepresentational grammar) while some others, notably lexical-functional grammar, have nonetheless continued to rely crucially on certain techniques inherited from constituency-based grammar, particularly context-free grammar. In computational linguistics there is a strong (if not universal) reliance on phrase structure as the medium via which to represent syntactic structure; call this the CONSENSUS VIEW. A significant