Dependency-Based Hybrid Model of Syntactic Analysis for the Languages with a Rather Free Word Order

Although phrase structure grammars have turned out to be a more popular approach for analysis and representation of the natural language syntactic structures, dependency grammars are often considered as being more appropriate for free word order languages. While building a parser for Latvian, a language with a rather free word order, we found (similarly to TIGER project for German and Talbanken05 for Swedish) that none of these models alone is adequate. Instead, we are proposing an original hybrid formalism that is strongly built on top of the dependency model borrowing the concept of a constituent from the phrase structure approach for representing analytical (multiword) forms. The proposed model has been implemented in an experimental parser and is being successfully applied for description of a wide coverage grammar for Latvian.