Well, It Depends. Reflections on the Dependency Turn in Computational Linguistics

After decades ruled by Phrase Structure Grammar in different areas of Computational Linguistics, during the past years, there has been a large growth of linguistic resources and tools for Natural Language Processing based on Dependency Grammar models. This paper discusses such dependency turn that happened in Computational Linguistics during the past two decades, showing that not only this is justified by serving the needs of specific practical tasks, but it is also theoretically motivated.