used for Syntactic Parsing and Relation Extraction

Dependency Parsing

Dependency - an asymmetric binary relation linking two lexical items (tokens): one is the head and the other is the dependent.

  • The head of a sentence (a.k.a. the root) is the main verb of the sentence; subject and object become it’s dependents.
  • if a token is modifying/specifying/describing another token
    • the modifying token → dependent
    • the modified token → head
  • Dependency structure/graph
    • look for dependencies between each pair of tokens
    • identify the modifier and modified token
    • a link from head to token specifying the grammatical function
    • Grammatical functions/dependency relation types
    • this forms a directed graph G (V = tokens ,E = grammatical functions) with a linear precedence order on V
    • Example (Horizontally arranged) -
    • Example (Tree of tokens)
    • Example (Tree of POS)
    • Example (Machine Readable, using indentation)
    • Example (Machine Readable, spaCy)

Alternate dependency structure parsing methods

An alternative dependency structure parsing method is via Predicate-Argument Structures (PAS) e.g. Enju Parser

whether the arguments are required depends on the token (verb). See Endocentric and exocentric constructions