Towards a Dynamic Syntax for Language Modelling

Abstract

This paper argues that a dynamic, “left-to-right” approach to modelling syntax is best suited to the demands of the language modelling task. An outline of a dynamic grammar is presented, which is based on word-by-word transitions between incomplete “prefix” semantic structures. It is argued that a further advantage of this approach is that it dispenses with the need for any notion of syntactic structure, whether based on constituents or dependencies, and is thus preferable by the argument of Occam’s razor.