Multilingual Natural Language Processing Applications: From Theory to Practice

Chapter 3. Syntax

Anoop Sarkar

Parsing uncovers the hidden structure of linguistic input. In many applications involving natural language, the underlying predicate-argument structure of sentences can be useful. The syntactic analysis of language provides a means to explicitly discover the various predicate-argument dependencies that may exist in a sentence. In natural language processing (NLP), the syntactic analysis of natural language input can vary from being very low-level, such as simply tagging each word in the sentence with a part of speech (POS), or very high level, such as recovering a structural analysis that identifies the dependency between each predicate in the sentence and its explicit and implicit arguments. The major bottleneck ...