19.3.1 Dependency Grammar

A dependency grammar G is a 7-tuple

\langle \SETWORDS, \SETCATS, \SETAGRS, \SETCOMPS, \SETMODS, \SETLEX,
\SETRULES\rangle

\SETWORDS

a finite set of strings notating the fully inflected forms of words

\SETCATS

a finite set of categories such as det for determiner or vfin for finite verb

\SETAGRS

a finite set of agreement tuples such as <masc sing 3 nom>

\SETCOMPS

a finite set of complement role types such as subject or dative (for dative NP complement)

\SETMODS

a finite set of modifier role types, such as adj for adjectives, disjoint from \SETCOMPS. We write \SETROLES=\SETCOMPS\uplus\SETMODS for the set of all role types. They will serve to label the edges of a dependency tree.

\SETLEX

a finite set of lexical entries (see later)

\SETRULES

a family of binary predicates, indexed by role labels, expressing local grammatical principles: for each \rho\in\SETROLES there is a \Gamma_{\rho}\in\SETRULES such that \Gamma_{\rho}(w_1,w_2) characterizes the admissibility of an edge labeled \rho from mother w_1 to daughter w_2.

In practice, in addition to category and agreement, we will need other features to encode miscellaneous details (e. g. `zu' particle, detachable verb prefixes, choice of auxiliary verb). For the time being, we will simply ignore them and postpone their introduction until the presentation of our implementation.


Denys Duchier, Claire Gardent and Joachim Niehren
Version 1.3.99 (20050412)