Towards Cross-language Application of Dependency Grammar
Timo Järvinen, Elisabeth Bertol, Septina Dian Larasati, Monica-Mihaela Rizea, María Ruíz Santabalbina, Milan Souček · 2015
This paper discusses the adaptation of the Stanford typed dependency model (de Marneffe and Manning 2008), initially designed for English, to the requirements of typologically different languages from the viewpoint of practical parsing. We argue for a framework of functional dependency grammar that is based on the idea of parallelism between syntax and semantics. There is a twofold challenge: (1) specifying the annotation scheme in order to deal with the morphological and syntactic peculiarities of each language and (2) maintaining cross- linguistically consistent annotations to ensure homogenous analysis for similar linguistic phenomena. We applied a number of modifications to the original Stanford scheme in an attempt to capture the language-specific grammatical features present in heterogeneous CoNLL-encoded data sets for German, Dutch, French, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Polish, Indonesian, and Traditional Chinese. From a multilingual perspective, we discuss features such as subject and object verb complements, comparative phrases, expletives, reduplication, copula elision, clitics and adpositions.