Word Order and Discontinuities in Dependency Grammar

Natural languages are always difficult to parse. Two phenomena that constantly pose problems for different formalisms are word order—what part of a sentence has to be placed where—and discontinuities—words that belong together but are not placed into the same phrase. Dependency grammar, a linguistic formalism based on binary relations between words, is very adequate for handling both problems. A parser for dependency grammar together with its grammar writing formalism is described in this paper. Word order and discontinuities in Hungarian are handled based on this formalism.