Dependency Grammar

Abstract

Dependency grammar is a descriptive and theoretical tradition in linguistics that can be traced back to antiquity. It has long been influential in the European linguistics tradition and has more recently become a mainstream approach to representing syntactic and semantic structure in natural language processing. In this review, we introduce the basic theoretical assumptions of dependency grammar and review some key aspects in which different dependency frameworks agree or disagree. We also discuss advantages and disadvantages of dependency representations and introduce Universal Dependencies, a framework for multilingual dependency-based morphosyntactic annotation that has been applied to more than 60 languages.