Graph Representation of the Syntactic Structure of the Lithuanian Sentence

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Šveikauskienė, Daiva

Affiliations: Institute of Mathematics and Informatics, Goštauto 12, LT-01108 Vilnius, Lithuania, e-mail: [email protected]

Abstract: The paper offers a new way of presenting the structure of a sentence. None of the two widely known methods of representation the syntactic structure of a sentence can be of any avail when applied to the Lithuanian language. Neither the tree, based on the phrase structure principle, nor the tree, suggested by the dependency grammar, do reflect all the syntactic information, which a Lithuanian sentence contains. The paper points out the differences between the Lithuanian language and other languages as well as presents the reasons why a Lithuanian sentence should be represented by a graph. The paper presents a generalized structure of a simple sentence in the Lithuanian language, namely, such a structure, which would embrace all the possible instances of a Lithuanian simple sentence. Every sentence of the text would have to activate only one path in the generalized structure.

Keywords: computer linguistics, natural language processing, machine translation, syntactic analysis, syntax, dependency grammar, graph theory application

Journal: Informatica, vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 407-418, 2005