Building Structural Trees
for Frozen Sentences
Simonetta Vietri
University of Salerno
Free and frozen sentences
(1) La donna vuotò il sacco
(The woman spilled the beans)
(2) Maria gettò la spugna
(Maria threw in the sponge)
- the subject, the verb and the object
are variable;
- the subject is variable while the verb, the
determiner, and the noun are frozen.
In order to syntactically parse (1)-(2) as
frozen sentences, we need first:
- to annotate them by constructing a
Nooj dictionary/grammar pair.
The definitional structure of (1)-(2), as
frozen sentences, is:
N0 V Det C1 =:
vuotare il sacco, gettare la spugna
The Lexicon-Grammar table C1D contains
about 1000 frozen sentences like (1)-(2)
The LG table has been converted in a Nooj
C1D dictionary:
vuotare,V+C1D+FXC+FLX=V3+DET=il+C1=sacco
+FXC: NooJ has to consider this entry if
the other components are found;
+FLX: the CC will be recognized if inflected;
+DET and +C: link the lexical entry, the
verb, to the frozen object “il sacco”.
C1D dictionary is associated with C1D grammar
to recognize occurrences of frozen sentences
The output of lexical parsing
Discontinous sequences annotation
The Syntactic Grammar allows to build structural
trees for sequences analyzable as free or frozen
sentences
Apply the grammar (check Syntactic Analysis)
The Structural Tree for Frozen Sentences
The Structural Tree for Free Sentences
Structural trees for discontinuous sequences
Annotate Text (add/remove annotations)
Future work
- Syntactic analysis of all Italian frozen
sentences (about 7000 entries, 30
Lexicon-grammar tables);
- Syntactic Analysis of free sentences
through the use of Lexicon-grammar
tables of Italian verbs (about 4500, 60
Lexicon-grammar tables).