From LFG structures to dependency relations

Abstract

In this article, I describe the derivation of dependency structures from LFG analyses, with a focus on the Norwegian grammar NorGram. Although it is the f-structures that at a first glance resemble dependency structures most, I show that c-structures are the correct starting point for the conversion, and I outline a conversion algorithm that relies on information from both c- and f-structure, the projection operator, and the grammar itself. The derived dependency structures are projective with non-atomic relations, but can be converted into nonprojective dependencies with atomic relations, and further into Universal Dependency-style structures. As an application, I describe how derived dependency versions of the NorGramBank gold-standard treebank are used to train dependency parsers with acceptable precision.