Syntax

What?

• reveal and describe relationships among words
  • on various levels:
    • noun, verb prepositional phrases, clauses
    • dependency relation

Why?

• syntactic units are carriers of meaning
  • e.g. "in the city"
    • meaning of "in", "the" is unclear, or very complicated
    • meaning of "in the city" is simply "where"
  • usable for mining information, question answering

How?

• prerequisites
  • morphological information (e.g. part of speech, number, gender)
  • lexical semantic information (e.g. "pregnant" goes with women only)
• statistical methods
  • annotated corpus -> inference of rules
  • hard to customize
• rule-based methods
  • hard to develop and maintain the grammar information
  • easy to customize

... to be continued