DepDist: Surface realization via regex and dependency distance tolerance

Abstract

This paper describes a method of inflecting and linearizing a lemmatized dependency tree by: (1) determining a regular expression and substitution to describe each productive wordform rule; (2) learning the dependency distance tolerance for each head-dependent pair, resulting in an edge-weighted directed acyclic graph (DAG); and (3) topologically sorting the DAG into a surface realization based on edge weight. The method's output for 11 languages across 18 treebanks is competitive with the other submissions to the Second Multilingual Surface Realization Shared Task (SR'19).