Leonid Iomdin Institute for Information Transmission Problems, Russian Academy of Sciences

Program Overview: p Basic Principles of The Meaning-Text theory by Igor Mel’čuk. Language as a Universal Translator of Senses to Texts and Texts to Senses. Text analysis and text generation. The theory of integral linguistic description by Juri Apresjan. The grammar and the dictionary of language. 2. Two syntactic levels of sentence representation: surface syntax and deep syntax. 2November 23, Lecture 2

Program Overview: p The dependency tree structure as a syntactic representation of the sentence. Dependency tree vs. Constituent tree: advantages and drawbacks of both types of representation. Limits of the dependency tree. The hypothesis of two syntactic starts. 4. The notions of syntactic relation. Major classes of syntactic relations: actant, attributive, coordinative and auxiliary relation classes. 5. The notion of syntactic feature. Syntactic features vs. Semantic features. 3November 23, Lecture 2

Program Overview: p Actants and valencies. Active, passive and distant valencies. The government pattern of a dictionary entry. An overview of actant syntactic relations. The predicative relation. The agentive relation. Completive relations. 7. An overview of attributive syntactic relations. Grammatical Agreement. Numerals and Quantitative Constructions. The system of Quantification Syntax of Russian. 8. Grammatical coordination as a type of grammatical subordination. An overview of coordinative syntactic relations. 4November 23, Lecture 2

Program Overview: p Auxiliary syntactic relations. Analytical grammatical forms as an object of syntax. 10 Microsyntax of Language. Minor Type Sentences. Syntactic Idioms. 11. Lexical Functions in the Dictionary and the Grammar. 12. Syntactic description and syntactic rules. Dependency Syntax in NLP. Dependency Syntax in Machine Translation. Syntactically Tagged Corpus of Texts. 5November 23, Lecture 2

6 Meaning  Text Theory by Igor Mel'čuk Theoretical Background:

November 23, Lecture 27 Sense is a construct, an artificial representation in a specially designed semantic language Assumption

November 23, Lecture 28 Syntax is the conversion of the morphological representation into a syntactic representation and vice versa Linguistic Disciplines

Surface Syntactic Representation (SSyntR) of a Sentence 9November 23, Lecture 2 Mel'čuk, I. A, & Pertsov, N. V. (1987).

Surface Syntactic Representation (SSyntR) of a Sentence in ETAP-3 10November 23, Lecture 2 Mel'čuk, I. A, & Pertsov, N. V. (1987).

Surface Syntax is the main linguistic discipline to which this course is devoted: conversion between deep morphological representation and surface syntactic representation 11November 23, Lecture 2

12 Morphological Analysis Input – a sentence in a conventional orthographic form Output – a morphological structure of a sentence

November 23, Lecture 213 Morphological Structure of a Sentence MorphS of a sentence is a sequence of morphological structures of all words belonging to the sentence MorphS of a word is the set of all MorphS of all homonyms of this word MorphS of a homonym is the lexeme name (lemma) plus part of speech plus a set of all inflectional features

November 23, Lecture 214 Morphological Structure of a Sentence Morphological features are values of morphological categories

November 23, Lecture 215 Morphological Categories Different parts of speech have different morphological categories

November 23, Lecture 216 Parts of Speech in English Noun Adjective Article Numeral Verb Adverb Conjunction Preposition Particle Interjection

November 23, Lecture 217 Morphological Features in English Cases of Nouns Main case Possessive case

November 23, Lecture 218 Morphological Features in English Cases of Personal Pronouns Main case Objective case

November 23, Lecture 219 Morphological Features in English Number of Nouns and Verbs Singular Plural

November 23, Lecture 220 Morphological Features in English Degrees of Comparison of Adjectives and Adverbs Positive Comparative Superlative

November 23, Lecture 221 Morphological Features in English Representation of Verbs Main Form Active participle Passive participle

November 23, Lecture 222 Morphological Features in English Tense of Verbs Nonpast Past

November 23, Lecture 223 Morphological Features in English Person of Verbs First Second Third

November 23, Lecture 224 Two types of Syntactic Representations Constituent Tree Phrase Structure NP ANVN VP S Small children like ice-cream

Two types of Syntactic Representations November 23, Lecture 225 Constituent Tree Phrase Structure

November 23, Lecture 226 Two types of Syntactic Representations LIKE ICE-CREAMCHILDREN SMALL Dependency Tree Structure predicative 1st completive modificative

November 23, Lecture 227 Two types of Syntactic Representations Dependency Tree Structure

November 23, Lecture 228 Two types of Syntactic Representations Constituent structure OR Dependency structure: which is better?

November 23, Lecture 229 Two types of Syntactic Representations Constituent structures focus on groups of words, while Dependency structures focus on links between individual words.

Two types of Syntactic Representations Of course, both these properties of an utterance are important. In the dependency tree, we are unable to resolve certain cases of conjunction reduction, cf. young men and women which will get a structure like November 23, Lecture 230

November 23, Lecture 231 Two types of Syntactic Representations while this is easily resolved in phrase structure representation: (young men) and women ‘young men and any women’ vs. young (men and women) ‘young men and young women’

Two types of Syntactic Representations On the other hand, the dependency tree allows us to distinguish between different types of noun phrases like Project Challenge, which may either mean (1) ‘challenge of the project’ or (2) ‘project named challenge’. November 23, Lecture 232

Two types of Syntactic Representations November 23, Lecture 233 1) 2)

Two types of Syntactic Representations Besides, the dependency tree formalism is strong enough to account for non-projective trees, which is not so easily achievable in phrase structure representations. November 23, Lecture 234

Two types of Syntactic Representations November 23, Lecture 235 The project was so bad that the commission rejected it.

Classes of Syntactic Relations 1) actant relations; 2) attributive relations; 3) coordinative relations; 4) auxiliary relations November 23, Lecture 236

Actant Relations 1) predicative relation; 2) agentive relation; 3) completive relations (1 st completive to 5 th completive); 4) copulative relation; 5) prepositional relation etc. November 23, Lecture 237

Actants and Valencies Several notions are needed: Predicate Situation Situation Participant, or Actant Valency (=valence) Frame representation Government Pattern November 23, Lecture 238

Actants and Valencies Two different sources of this approach: Linguistics (Lucien Tesnière, Charles Fillmore, Jury Apresjan) Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science (Marvin Minsky, Terry Winograd) November 23, Lecture 239

Actants and Valencies L. Tesnière. Éléments de syntaxe structurale, Klincksieck, Paris 1959 Ch. Fillmore. Frame semantics and the nature of language, 1976 Ju.Apresjan. Lexical Semantics. Moscow 1974 M.Minsky. A Framework for Representing Knowledge, 1975 T. Winograd. Understanding Natural Language, 1972 November 23, Lecture 240

Actants and Valencies SLEEP SEE GIVE SELL LEASE CURE rus. KOMANDIROVAT’ ‘send on an official trip’ November 23, Lecture 241

Actants and Valencies There are three types of valencies: active passive distant November 23, Lecture 242

Actants and Valencies Active valencies transmission of [D2] personal data by [D1] Europol to [D3] third States transmission by [D1] insects of [D2] spores from [D3] diseased trees to [D4] wounds on healthy trees November 23, Lecture 243

Actants and Valencies Passive valencies red ball November 23, Lecture 244

Actants and Valencies Distant valencies the ball is red I wanted John to do the job Nastassja Kinski was the favorite actress of my sister. Nastassja Kinski was her favorite actress. November 23, Lecture 245

Actants’ Interplay Population growth is the reason of climate change We cannot refund tickets for the reason of adverse weather conditions November 23, Lecture 246

Predicative Relation The government member of the predicative SSyntRel being invariably a finite verb, its dependent member can be one of the four items: November 23, Lecture 247

Next lectures Actantial Syntactic Relations (continuation). Attributive Relations 48November 23, Lecture 2