Resemblances between Meaning-Text Theory and

Functional Generative Description

Zdeněk Žabokrtský

Institute of Formal and Applied LinguisticsCharles University, Prague

Functional Generative Description

• developed in Prague since mid 60’s (Sgall,1967)

• sharing most of the „peculiarities of the MTM“ (Bolshakov and Gebulkh,2000):– “multilevel character of the model”– “orientation to synthesis”– “distinguishing deep and surface syntactic representation” – “accounting of communicative structure” – “orientation to languages of a type different from English” – “labeling syntactic relations between words” – “keeping traditions and terminology of classical linguistics”

Levels of representationin MTT and FGD

semantic

deep-syntactic

surface-syntactic

deep-morphological

surface-morphological

deep-phonological

surface-phonological

tectogrammatical

surface-syntactic

morphological

morphonological

phonetic

DSyntR vs. tectogrammatics

• in both– skelet of the representation – dependency tree (plus

non-tree relations of co-reference)– nodes ~ semantically full lexemes– inflectional meanings: grammemes/grammatemes– ficitious lexemes– valency: actants vs. circumstantials

• in DSyntR– DSynt prosodic structure

• in TGTS– semantically motivated inventory of dependency

relations, so called functors (ACT, PAT, ADDR, ORIG, EFF, CAUS, DIR?, LOC, TWHEN, CAUS, BEN...)

Side remark: re-inventing the DSyntR/TGTS in PropBank

(1) 2002 – annotated propositions: only verbs and their arguments

(2) adding ‘modifiers of event variables’

(3) adding arguments of nouns

(4) adding discourse connectives

FGD implementation:Prague Dependency

Treebank• long-term research project aimed at creating a

syntactically annotated corpus based on the framework of FGD

• since 1995, inspired by Penn Treebank

• manually annotated Czech newspaper texts

• layered annotation scheme

• PDT 1.0 released in 2001 (distributed by LDC)

• PDT 2.0 to appear in 2006

Layered annotation scenarioof PDT 2.0

• 3 layers of annotation– t-layer - tectogrammatical

layer– a-layer – analytical layer– m-layer – morphological layer

• original text– w-layer – original sentence

m-layer sampleForm Lemma Morphological tag

Některé některý PZFP1----------

kontury kontura NNFP1-----A----

problému problém NNIS2-----A----

se se_^(zvr._zájmeno/částice) P7-X4----------

však však J^-------------

po po-1 RR--6----------

oživení oživení_^(*3it) NNNS6-----A----

Havlovým Havlův_;S_^(*3el) AUIS7M---------

projevem projev NNIS7-----A----

zdají zdát VB-P---3P-AA---

být být Vf--------A----

jasnější jasný AAFP1----2A----

. . Z:-------------

(Some contours of the problem seem to be clearer after the resurgence by Havel's speech.)

a-layer sample

t-layer sample

Coordination in dependency trees in PDT

• physically still a tree structure, but tree edges do not always directly correspond to dependencies

• the real dependency and coordination relations can be (deterministically) derived by edge composition

• direct vs. effective parent/children

PDT 2.0 – amount of the data

Summary

• FGD – similar to MTT in several aspects

• PDT – implementation of FGD framework on a large data