Structural disambiguation with constraint propagation

Abstract

We present a new grammatical formalism called Constraint Dependency Grammar (CDG) in which every grammatical rule is given as a constraint on word-to-word modifications. CDG parsing is formalized as a constraint satisfaction problem over a finite domain so that efficient constraint-propagation algorithms can be employed to reduce structural ambiguity without generating individual parse trees. The weak generative capacity and the computational complexity of CDG parsing are also discussed.