Word Ordering as a Graph Rewriting Process

Sylvain Kahane, François Lareau

Abstract: This paper shows how the correspondence between a unordered dependency tree and a sentence that expresses it can be achieved by transforming the tree into a string where each linear precedence link corresponds to one specific syntactic relation. We propose a formal grammar with a distributed architecture that can be used for both synthesis and analysis. We argue for the introduction of a topological tree as an intermediate step between dependency syntax and word order.