A description language for syntactically annotated corpora

Abstract

This paper introduces a description language for syntactically annotated corpora which allows for encoding both the syntactic annotation to a corpus and the queries to a syntactically annotated corpus. In terms of descriptive adequacy and computational efficiency, the description language is a compromise between script-like corpus query languages and high-level, typed unification-based grammar formalisms.

A corpus study into word order variation in German subordinate clauses: Animacy affects linearization independently of grammatical function assignment

“…We searched the NEGRA II corpus using the TIGERSearch system (König and Lezius 2000), version 2.0. The query "(#n1:[cat="S"] >CP #n2: [pos="KOUS"|cat="CCP"])" searches for a node (addressed by variable #n1) labeled with the nonterminal feature cat (category) S. This node should yield an edge labeled CP (complementizer) linked to the node addressed by the variable #n2.…”

TIGER: Linguistic Interpretation of a German Corpus

“…5 A correct English translation of the example sentence is the following: 'According to press reports, negotiators from both parties have agreed on a draft law'. 6 The precedence of two inner nodes is defined as the precedence of their leftmost terminal successors (König and Lezius, 2000a).…”

On the use of electronic corpora for theoretical linguistics

“…Nevertheless, the data we find in this way are striking counterexamples to the above generalization and form the basis of alternative theories for licensing such partial NP constituents (De Kuthy and Meurers, 2001;De Kuthy, 2002): To overcome the shortcomings of the crude approximation we used in our search pattern for this example, one has to rely on more richly annotated corpora, such as the treebanks mentioned at the end of the previous section. To search in such treebanks, query languages and tools which can refer to syntactic structure or dominance relations have been developed (cf., e.g., Pito, 1994;Brew, 1999;Rohde, 2001;Mckelvie, 2001;König and Lezius, 2000;Kallmeyer, 2000;Steiner, 2001;Kepser, 2003). 21 For example, to search for example patterns such as the one in this section, Kallmeyer (2000) defines a formal language which can encode the search for ''a prepositional phrase modifying the accusative object and preceding the finite verb (i.e., in the so-called Vorfeld), and an accusative object between finite verb and non-finite forms (i.e., in the so-called Mittelfeld).''…”