Constraint Dependency Grammars: SuperARVs, Language Modeling, and Parsing

Over the past ten years, we have been investigating the use of Constraint Dependency Grammar (CDG). This effort began shortly after Maruyama introduced the concept of a CDG (Maruyama, 1990b,c). In Maruyama’s original vision, grammar constraints were used to limit dependencies in the space of potential parses of a sentence to those that are valid. This vision of CDG was adapted by the speech group at Purdue University in order to address speech processing applications and by Menzel and his students at the University of Hamburg (Heinecke et al., 1998; Menzel, 1994, 1995, 1996; Schröder et al., 2000) for applications requiring grammar robustness, such as the diagnosis of grammar errors by second language learners. These two foci have had deep impacts on the way each of these labs has utilized CDG. This chapter focuses on our spoken language processing path.