Toward Synchronous Extensible Dependency Grammar

Extensible Dependency Grammar (XDG; Debusmann, 2007) is a flexible, modular dependency grammar framework in which sentence analyses consist of multigraphs and processing takes the form of constraint satisfaction. This paper shows how XDG lends itself to grammar-driven machine translation and introduces the machinery necessary for synchronous XDG. Since the approach relies on a shared semantics, it resembles interlingua MT. It differs in that there are no separate analysis and generation phases. Rather, translation consists of the simultaneous analysis and generation of a single source-target “sentence”.