After presenting a novel O(n^3) parsing algorithm for dependency grammar, we
develop three contrasting ways to stochasticize it. We propose (a) a lexical
affinity model where words struggle to modify each other, (b) a sense tagging
model where words fluctuate randomly in their selectional preferences, and (c)
a generative model where the speaker fleshes out each word's syntactic and
conceptual structure without regard to the implications for the hearer. We also
give preliminary empirical results from evaluating the three models' parsing
performance on annotated Wall Street Journal training text (derived from the
Penn Treebank). In these results, the generative (i.e., top-down) model
performs significantly better than the others, and does about equally well at
assigning part-of-speech tags.Comment: 6 pages, LaTeX 2.09 packaged with 4 .eps files, also uses colap.sty
and acl.bs
