Syntactic analysis

Дельта Волги является восьмым чудом света. (Delta of the Volga is the eighth wonder of the world).

What is common between Delta of the river and syntactic analysis?

The word "Delta" has two meanings: Greek letter and estuary of the river. The coincidence is not surprising - delta of the river has branching structure. To model such objects and processes in Mathematics an abstract structure - a tree-graph is used.
It turned out that natural language sentence also has branching hierarchical structure: word subordination form a tree.

See photo gallery of deltas of rivers.

As long as the mankind exists, the natural language exists. From this we can draw a conclusion that hierarchical structure of syntax reflects the fundamental principles of human thinking.

Natural language parser

To study objects and processes of reality people at all times have been inventing different devices. To study micro- and macro- cosm microscope and telescope were invented. Computer program DictaScope®, developed in Dictum® Software laboratory, makes syntactic analysis and produces the results in pictorial form. Like an electron microscope allows discerning a molecule's structure, the DictaScope allows examining word subordination and grammatical values of the words in a sentence.

The kernel of parser Dictascope® realizes universal language dependencies so it can be used for the development of parsers for different languages on a common base. There are experimental versions for English and German languages in the laboratory. Russian version is the most advanced at the present moment.

Recovery of incomplete constructions

A unique capability of Russian version of parser DictaScope® is a recovery of incomplete constructions. The syntax of Russian language permits omission of words when these are clear from context. This is done in order to shorten wordings and to avoid repetitions. Software system DictaScope® allows recovering pronouns and missing members in a number of cases typical for Russian language, including elliptic constructions.

Information for developers

The library which is a part of a supply set allows software developers to integrate syntactic analysis functions into various systems of automated text processing.

The software functions under operational system Microsoft Windows. Syntactic parser developed by A.Kovalenko (www.keva.ru) was used during development of program DictaScope^®. DictaScope^® is compatible with ABBYY Software House's (www.abbyy.ru) software Morphology Engine 4.0. For correct functioning of visualization module you will need Sun Java version 1.1 or higher.

For more detailed info about recovering see documentation. You can obtain it, as well as familiarize yourself with the licensing terms, on inquiry.

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