High-Probability Syntactic Links

In this example, however, by the moment the word is has been read, the word p r o b l e m is already engaged in other strongly predicted constructions, namely the prepositional phrase of" this p r o b l e m and even the whole noun phrase the s o l u t i o n o f this p r o b l e m . A conflict arises, and plausibility of the new hypothesis becomes much lower. Such syntactic relations may concern not only adjacent words. For instance, in (1) it is for the pair s o l u t i o n .. . is that the "subject verb" relation will be conjectured. In this paper, slrong prediction of syntactic relations is modeled within the framework of dependency syntax (see Mel'~uk 1974, 1988). According to this theory, (surface) syntactic structure of a sentence is an oriented tree whose nodes are the words of the sentence (more precisely, their lexico-morphological interpretations). The arcs of the tree represent syntactic links between words and are labeled by names of syntactic relations. The result of strong prediction is a partial parse of the sentence, in which high-probability syntactic links are established. In our opinion, dependency structures are better adapted to par t ia l pars ing than const i tuent structures. The reason is that the dependency structure of a segment is the same both when the segment is considered as isolated and when it is considered as a part of some sentence (by "segment" we understand any sequence of words). General ly, this is not true for constituent structures. For instance, the segment l s a w a m a n has the dependency structure *