LFG without C-structures

Abstract

We explore the use of two dependency parsers, Malt and MST, in a Lexical Functional Grammar parsing pipeline. We compare this to the traditional LFG parsing pipeline which uses constituency parsers. We train the dependency parsers not on classical LFG f-structures but rather on modified dependency-tree versions of these in which all words in the input sentence are represented and multiple heads are removed. For the purposes of comparison, we also modify the existing CFG-based LFG parsing pipeline so that these "LFG-inspired" dependency trees are produced. We find that the differences in parsing accuracy over the various parsing architectures is small.