1. Example-Based Treebank Querying Liesbeth Augustinus Vincent Vandeghinste Frank Van Eynde CLARIN Sofia, 2012-10-28

2. NEDERBOOMS Exploitation of Dutch treebanks for research in linguistics CLARIN-VL Project Centre for Computational Linguistics (CCL) Dutch Grammar and Language Use (NGTG) Goals: –User-friendly tools –Access to large data files

3. NEDERBOOMS How can we combine the data-oriented approach of treebank mining with the knowledge-oriented method of theoretical and descriptive linguistics?

4. QUERYING LASSY Existing search tools: dtsearch (Kloosterman 2007) Dact (de Kok 2010) stand-alone tools query language: XPath = standard query language for xml trees

5. QUERYING LASSY Some examples: “look for all NP nodes in which the head noun is modified by the adjective ‘politiek’, e.g. politieke discussies” //node[@cat="np" and node[@rel="mod" and @pos="adj" and @root="politiek"] and node[@rel="hd" and @pos="noun"]

6. QUERYING LASSY Some examples: “look for all NP nodes in which the head noun is modified by the adjective ‘politiek’, e.g. politieke discussies” //node[@cat="np" and node[@rel="mod" and @pos="adj" and @root="politiek"] and node[@rel="hd" and @pos="noun"] “look for verb clusters in which a separable verb particle occurs between two verb forms, e.g. “Hij zegt dat ze spoedig zullen kennis maken” //node[node[@rel="hd" and @pos="verb" and @begin <../node[@rel="vc"]/node[@rel="svp" and @pos="part"]/@begin] and node[@rel="vc" and node[@rel="svp" and @begin <../node[@rel="hd" and @pos="verb"]/@begin]]]

7. QUERYING LASSY XPath –Not user-friendly –Knowledge of Alpino grammar necessary = problematic for non-technical linguists Verify theory through data with corpus or treebank examples Time consuming, requires some effort

8. QUERYING LASSY XPath –Not user-friendly –Knowledge of Alpino grammar necessary = problematic for non-technical linguists Verify theory through data with corpus or treebank examples Time consuming, requires some effort How to make interaction between computational linguistics and theoretical linguistics possible?

9. GrETEL Greedy Extraction of Trees for Empirical Linguistics Search tool based on example sentences Input = natural language No explicit knowledge of formal query language nor Alpino grammar required Bridge gap between descriptive and computational linguistics Available online http://nederbooms.ccl.kuleuven.be (optimised for Mozilla Firefox)http://nederbooms.ccl.kuleuven.be

10. GrETEL - online

12. GrETEL - input Green versus red word order in Dutch –green: past participle – auxiliary De NAVO stelt dat ze er alles aan gedaan heeft –red: auxiliary – past participle De NAVO stelt dat ze er alles aan heeft gedaan “The NATO claim that they have done everything in their power” (deredactie.be)

13. GrETEL - input

14. >> parsed with Alpino

15. GrETEL - annotation

16. >> info added to Alpino parse

17. GrETEL – query info

18. input example

19. GrETEL – query info input example Alpino parse

20. GrETEL – query info input example query treeAlpino parse

21. GrETEL – query info input example query treeAlpino parse XPath query

22. GrETEL – query info input example query treeAlpino parse XPath query treebanks

23. GrETEL – query tree

24. >> subtree extraction

25. GrETEL – query tree query tree

26. GrETEL – query tree query tree>> XPath generator >>

27. GrETEL – query tree query tree //node[@cat="ssub" and node[@rel="vc" and @cat="ppart" and node[@rel="hd" and @pos="verb"]] and node[@rel="hd" and @pos="verb" and @root="heb"]] XPath expression>> XPath generator >>

28. GrETEL – treebanks

29. LASSY Small in PostgreSQL database >> no local installation required

30. GrETEL – results

31. >> (adapted) query

32. GrETEL – results >> (adapted) query >> quantitative information

33. GrETEL – results

34. >> tree viewer

35. GrETEL – results >> tree viewer >> list of results

36. Thanks for your attention! Questions? liesbeth@ccl.kuleuven.be http://nederbooms.ccl.kuleuven.be