Searching treebanks for functional constraints: cross-lingual experiments in grammatical relation assignment

Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2006)

Abstract

The paper reports on a detailed quantitative analysis of distributional language data of both Italian and Czech, highlighting the relative contribution of a number of distributed grammatical factors to sentence-based identification of subjects and direct objects. The work is based on a Maximum Entropy model of stochastic resolution of grammatical conflicting constraints, and is demonstrably capable of putting explanatory theoretical accounts to the challenging test of an extensive, usage-based empirical verification.