Lexicalized Grammar 101

I propose a tree-rewriting grammar formalism, TAGLET, defined by the usual complementation operation and the simplest imaginable modification operation. TAGLET is context free and permits lexicalization of treebank parses (though TAGLET is only weakly equivalent in generative power to general CFGs), as well as straightforward exploration of rich hierarchical syntactic structures and detailed feature structures in the spirit of current linguistic syntax. It admits a dynamic-programming parser, with the N×N×N chart search characteristic of CFGs and a clean “strong competence” implementation of combinatory operations. Derivations are lexicalized dependency structures: this invites the assignment of probabilities to structures based on bigram dependencies, and at the same time introduces the natural search space for natural language generation. In short, the formalism offers a simple and effective scaffold to bring the issues of current research into classroom learning. Lexicalized Grammar 101