Writing Weighted Constraints for Large Dependency Grammars

Implementing dependency grammar as a set of defeasible declarative rules has fundamental advantages such as expressiveness, automatic disambiguation, and robustness. Although an implementation and a successful large-scale grammar of German are available, so far the construction of constraint dependency grammars has not been described at length. We report on techniques that were used to write the parsing grammar for German and should be useful for a general account of developing a large-scale constraint dependency grammar.