Data-oriented parsing is a probabilistic grammar formalism in computational linguistics

Computational linguistics

Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the statistical or rule-based modeling of natural language from a computational perspective....

. DOP was conceived by Remko Scha

Remko Scha

Remko J. H. Scha is a professor of computational linguistics at the faculty of humanities and Institute for Logic, Language and Computation at the University of Amsterdam. He is also an internationally renowned composer and performer of algorithmic art....

 in 1990 with the aim of developing a performance

Linguistic performance

In linguistics, performance has two senses:It is also one of the two elements in Chomsky's performance-competence distinction, which relates to Language production , with an emphasis upon how this is different from Competence, or the mental knowledge of language itself...

-oriented grammar framework. Unlike other probabilistic formalisms, DOP takes into account all subtrees contained in a treebank

Treebank

A treebank or parsed corpus is a text corpus in which each sentence has been parsed, i.e. annotated with syntactic structure. Syntactic structure is commonly represented as a tree structure, hence the name Treebank...

 rather than being restricted to, for example, 2-level subtrees (like PCFGs

Stochastic context-free grammar

A stochastic context-free grammar is a context-free grammar in which each production is augmented with a probability...

).

Several variants of DOP have been developed. The initial version was based on tree-substitution grammar, while more recently, DOP has been combined with lexical-functional grammar (LFG). The resulting DOP-LFG finds an application in machine translation

Machine translation

Machine translation, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates the use of computer software to translate text or speech from one natural language to another.On a basic...

.