Dependency Grammar and the Parsing of Chinese Sentences

Dependency Grammar has been used by linguists as the basis of the syntactic components of their grammar formalisms. It has also been used in natural language parsing. In China, attempts have been made to use this grammar formalism to parse Chinese sentences using corpus-based techniques. This paper reviews the properties of Dependency Grammar as embodied in four axioms for the well-formedness conditions for dependency structures. It is shown that allowing multiple governors as done by some followers of this formalism is unnecessary. The practice of augmenting Dependency Grammar with functional labels is also discussed in the light of building functional structures when the sentence is parsed. This will also facilitate semantic interpretation.