Investigating Dominant Word Order on Universal Dependencies with Graph Rewriting

Hee-Soo Choi (1, 2) , Bruno Guillaume (2) , Karën Fort (2, 3) , Guy Perrier (2)

1 SU - Sorbonne Université
2 SEMAGRAMME - Semantic Analysis of Natural Language
3 STIH - Sens, Texte, Informatique, Histoire

This paper details experiments we performed on the Universal Dependencies 2.7 corpora in order to investigate the dominant word order in the available languages. For this purpose, we used a graph rewriting tool, GREW, which allowed us to go beyond the surface annotations and identify the implicit subjects. We first measured the distribution of the six different word orders (SVO, SOV, VSO, VOS, OVS, OSV) in the corpora and investigated when there was a significant difference in the corpora within a given language. Then, we compared the obtained results with information provided in the WALS database (Dryer and Haspelmath, 2013) and inÖstling (2015). Finally, we examined the impact of using a graph rewriting tool for this task. The tools and resources used for this research are all freely available.

Domaines: Traitement du texte et du document

Hee-Soo Choi, Bruno Guillaume, Karën Fort, Guy Perrier. Investigating Dominant Word Order on Universal Dependencies with Graph Rewriting. RANLP 2021 - Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, Sep 2021, Online, Bulgaria. ⟨hal-03322613⟩