DepDist: Surface realization via regex and learned dependency-distance tolerance

AbstractThis paper describes a method of inflecting and linearizing a lemmatized dependency tree by: (1) determining a regular expression and substitution to describe each productive wordform rule; (2) learning the dependency distance tolerance for each head-dependent pair, resulting in an edge-weighted directed acyclic graph (DAG); and (3) topologically sorting the DAG into a surface realization based on edge weight. The method’s output for 11 languages across 18 treebanks is competitive with the other submissions to the Second Multilingual Surface Realization Shared Task (SR ‘19).