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Construction Grammar approach for Tamil dependency parsingAuthor: Vigneshwaran Muralidharan Date: 2016-10-14 Report no: IIIT/TH/2016/57 Advisor:Dipti Misra Sharma AbstractSyntactic parsing in NLP is the task of working out the grammatical structure of sentences. Some of the purely formal approaches to parsing such as phrase structure grammar, dependency grammar have been successfully employed for a variety of languages. While phrase structure based constituent analysis is possible for fixed order languages such as English, dependency analysis between the grammatical units have been suitable for many free word order languages such as Indian languages. All these parsing approaches rely on identifying the linguistic units based on their formal syntactic properties and establishing the relationships between such units in the form of a tree. Dravidian languages which are spoken in Southern India are morphologically-rich, agglutinative languages whose characterization on purely structural terms such as adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, postpositions as well as traditional interpretations of tense and finiteness pose problems in their syntactic analysis which are well-discussed in literature. We propose that the morpho-syntactic structures of Dravidian languages are better analysed from the theoretical perspectives of “Cognitive Grammar” or “Construction Grammar” where every grammatical structure is treated as a symbol that directly maps to meaningful conceptualizations. In other words, natural language is not treated as a formal system but as a functional system that is entirely symbolic or semiotic right from lexicon to grammar. Through linguistic evidences we point out that morpho-syntactic structures in Dravidian languages have their basis in meaningful discourse conceptualizations. Subsequently we hierarchically arrange all these conceptualizations into construction schemas that exhibit multiple-inheritance relationships and we explain all concrete morpho-syntactic structures as instances of these schemas. Based on this fresh theoretical grounding, we model parsing as automatic identification of meaningful dependency relations between such meaningful construction units. We formulated an annotation scheme for labelling the construction units and dependency relations that can exist between these units. Our approach to full parser annotation shows an average MALT LAS of 82.21% on Tamil gold annotated corpus of 935 sentences in a five-fold validation experiment. We conducted experiments by varying training data size, annotation scheme, length of a sentence in terms of number of chunks, granularity of tags and report the parser results of these scenarios. Finally, we build a pipeline with splitter, construction labeller, grouper as intermediate layers before MALT parser input and release the working full parser module. Full thesis: pdf Centre for Language Technologies Research Centre |
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