System of Pronominal Words in Czech with Respect to German and English Magda Razímová

Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics Charles University Prague, Czech Republic [email protected]

Outline of the talk

 Introduction  Pronouns in the Prague Dependency Treebank 2.0

 Personal pronouns  Other pronoun types  Pro-adverbs and pro-numerals  Application of the presented scheme to English and German  Final remarks SLE 2006 2/20 [email protected]

Introduction

  Pronouns and other pro-forms      to replace or substitute other words, phrases, or sentences anaphoric and deictic functions pronouns, also pro-adjectives, pro-adverbs, and pro-numerals ‘closed’ classes semantically relevant regularities within the sub-classes (

nobody-never-nowhere; everybody-always-everywhere

) Pro-forms in the Prague Dependency Treebank 2.0

   formal linguistic system for annotation of pro-forms making the present regularities explicit part of the deep-syntactic layer (tectogrammatical layer, t-layer) representation by a reduced set of (underlying) lemmas in combination with relevant attributes SLE 2006 3/20 [email protected]

PDT project – historical background

 mid 1960’s Functional Generative Description (Petr Sgall et al.)  1994  1995 Czech National Corpus PDT started  1998  2001 PDT 0.5 pre-release PDT 1.0 released by LDC ( LDC2001T10 )   manual annotation of morphology and surface syntax 2006 PDT 2.0 (just) released by LDC ( LDC2006T01 )  interlinked morphological, surface-syntactic and complex deep-syntactic annotation SLE 2006 4/20 [email protected]

PDT 2.0 Layers of annotation

  tectogrammatical layer  deep-syntactic dependency tree  59 % of the a-layer data (3,165 doc., 49,431 sent., 833,195 tokens) analytical layer  surface-syntactic dependency tree  75 % of the m-layer data (5,330 doc., 87,913 sent., 1,503,739 tokens)  morphological layer  m-lemma and m-tag associated with each token  7,110 textual documents (115,844 sent. with 1,957,247 tokens)  word layer  original text, segmented on word boundaries SLE 2006 5/20 lit: He-was would went toforest.

Outline of the talk

 Introduction  Pronouns in the Prague Dependency Treebank 2.0

 Personal pronouns  Other pronoun types  Pro-adverbs and pro-numerals  Application of the presented scheme to English and German  Final remarks SLE 2006 6/20 [email protected]

Pronouns in the Prague Dependency Treebank 2.0

 at the t-layer, personal pronouns treated separately from the other pronoun types  pro-adverbs and pro-numerals represented in the same way like indefinite, negative etc. pronouns  semantic features originally present in the word form extracted and stored as values of inner attributes of the t-node that corresponds to the given word form SLE 2006 7/20 [email protected]

Personal pronouns in the PDT 2.0

     all personal pronouns (no matter whether they are present in the sentence, or restored at the t-layer) are represented by nodes labeled with a single, ‘artificial’ lemma #PersPron grammatical information that a personal pronoun expresses in the sentence is stored in node attributes person , number , and gender attribute politeness for discerning between honorific and non-honorific usage for example: the pronoun

vy

in

vy jste přišel

(

you came

politely to a single person) is represented as follows:  #PersPron + 2 nd (person) + singular + masc.anim.

+ polite said possessive pronouns which correspond to personal pronouns (

jeho

(his),

náš

(our)) are represented in the same way SLE 2006 8/20 [email protected]

Personal pronouns and co-reference

at the t-layer, representation of personal pronouns was completed with the annotation of co-reference (i.e relations between nodes referring to the same entity)

Tím, že Evropská unie nechala ve rwandské operaci Francii na holičkách, podle Léotarda ukázala, že její politika nemá žádný africký rozměr.

SLE 2006 no African dimension.) ( According to Léotard, by the fact that the European 9/20 [email protected]

Other pronoun types in the PDT 2.0

     indefinite, negative, interrogative, and relative pronouns in Czech pronoun system, single meanings are expressed regularly by means of a relatively small group of prefixes that join together with a small set of bases transparent correspondence between the semantic features and formal composition of pronouns:   indefinite prefix

ně-

:

někdo

negative prefix

ni-

:

nikdo

(somebody)

– něco

(nobody)

– nic

(something) (nothing)

… – nějaký

(some) at the t-layer, pronouns with the same base element grouped together – each pronoun group represented by the lemma corresponding to the respective relative pronoun:  e.g.

někdo

(somebody) and

nikdo

(nobody) represented by the lemma

kdo

(who)  corresponding possessive pronouns represented in the same way the semantic feature completing the reduced lemma was stored in the indeftype attribute SLE 2006 10/20 [email protected]

Other pronoun types and the indeftype attribute

  all indefinite, negative, interrogative, and relative pronouns represented by only four lemmas at the t-layer the reduced lemmas were completed by a value of the indeftype (actually 11 values) attribute SLE 2006 11/20 [email protected]

Pro-adverbs and pro-numerals in the PDT 2.0

 in Czech, pro-adverbs (e.g.

nikde

(nowhere),

nějak

(somehow)) and pro-numerals (e.g.

několik

(a few)) express the same semantic features like pronouns  represented in the same way like indefinite, negative, interrogative, and relative pronouns at the t-layer  another derivational relation can be seen between pro adverbs with directional meaning and those of location – for example, the adverb

odněkud

(from somewhere) is represented as follows:  lemma

kde

(where) + indef value (of the indeftype functor DIR1 capturing the directional meaning attribute) + SLE 2006 12/20 [email protected]

Zakl á d á -li si n ě kdo na slov ů m, pak ud ě l á tom, že se vyhýb á ciz í m nejl í p, když se nikdy nepod í v á do Etymologick é ho slovn í ku jazyka č esk é ho.

If someone finds it important that [he] eliminates foreign words, then the best thing [he] can do is if [he] never looks in the Etymology Dictionary of Czech.

SLE 2006 13/20 [email protected]

Outline of the talk

 Introduction  Pronouns in the Prague Dependency Treebank 2.0

 Personal pronouns  Other pronoun types  Pro-adverbs and pro-numerals  Application of the presented scheme to English and German  Final remarks SLE 2006 14/20 [email protected]

Application of the presented scheme to English and German

  indefinite, negative, interrogative, and relative pronouns and other pro-forms are unproductive classes with (at least to a certain extent) transparent derivational relations also in other languages preliminary sketch of several English and German pronouns:  still not solved: English

anybody

, German

niemand

and

nirgendjemand

… SLE 2006 15/20 [email protected]

Related conception: Helbig’s MultiNet (i)

 similar treatment of indefinite and negative pronouns as of two subtypes of the same entity was introduced also in the MultiNet knowledge representation system  (Helbig, H. (2001),

Die semantische Struktur natürlicher Sprache

, Springer, 2001) (Negators and their antonyms, in Helbig (2001), p. 164) SLE 2006 16/20 [email protected]

Related conception: Helbig’s MultiNet (ii)

Sentential negation with

kein

(no) Constituent negation with

kein

(no)

Peter lent his tools to nobody.

(in Helbig (2001), p. 170) SLE 2006

Peter buys no motorcycle, but a bike.

17/20 [email protected]

Outline of the talk

 Introduction  Pronouns in the Prague Dependency Treebank 2.0

 Personal pronouns  Other pronoun types  Pro-adverbs and pro-numerals  Application of the presented scheme to English and German  Final remarks SLE 2006 18/20 [email protected]

Final remarks

  achievements:    all pro-forms in Czech divided into two groups: • • personal (and corresponding possessive) pronouns other pronoun types (and corresponding possessive pronouns) and other pro-forms several pro-form analogies crossing the part-of-speech boundaries are explicitly marked in the annotation verification of the annotation scheme on large-scale data future work:   to elaborate the scheme for other languages in more detail, taking into consideration specific phenomena of the respective language to describe the relations among the Czech and other pro-form systems (for example, for the purposes of machine translation) SLE 2006 19/20 [email protected]

http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/pdt2.0/

SLE 2006 20/20 [email protected]