Expectation-based Minimalist Grammars
This work addresses a theoretical problem in computational linguistics for researchers by proposing an incremental simplification of existing grammar formalisms.
The paper tackles the problem of simplifying Minimalist Grammars by introducing Expectation-based Minimalist Grammars (e-MGs), which rely on lexically encoded categorial top-down expectations to drive structure building, resulting in a core derivation that is the same for both parsing and generation.
Expectation-based Minimalist Grammars (e-MGs) are simplified versions of the (Conflated) Minimalist Grammars, (C)MGs, formalized by Stabler (Stabler, 2011, 2013, 1997) and Phase-based Minimalist Grammars, PMGs (Chesi, 2005, 2007; Stabler, 2011). The crucial simplification consists of driving structure building only by relying on lexically encoded categorial top-down expectations. The commitment on a top-down derivation (as in e-MGs and PMGs, as opposed to (C)MGs, Chomsky, 1995; Stabler, 2011) allows us to define a core derivation that should be the same in both parsing and generation (Momma & Phillips, 2018).