Language modelling with Dynamic Syntax

In this paper we introduce a system for the robust analysis of English using the apporach of Dynamic Syntax, in which the syntactic process is modelled as the word-by-word construction of a semantic representation. We argue that the inherent incrementality of the approach, in contrast with the essentially static assumptions of standard generative grammar, has clear advantages for the task of language modelling. To demonstrate its potential we show that this syntactic approach consistently outperforms a standard trigram model in word recovery tasks on parsable sentences. Furthermore, these results are achieved without recourse to hand-prepared training data.