Efficient Dependency Graph Matching with the IMS Open Corpus Workbench

Abstract

State-of-the-art dependency representations such as the Stanford Typed Dependencies may represent the grammatical relations in a sentence as directed, possibly cyclic graphs. Querying a syntactically annotated corpus for grammatical structures that are represented as graphs requires graph matching, which is a non-trivial task. In this paper, we present an algorithm for graph matching that is tailored to the properties of large, syntactically annotated corpora. The implementation of the algorithm is built on top of the popular IMS Open Corpus Workbench, allowing corpus linguists to re-use existing infrastructure. An evaluation of the resulting software, CWB-treebank, shows that its performance in real world applications, such as a web query interface, compares favourably to implementations that rely on a relational database or a dedicated graph database while at the same time offering a greater expressive power for queries. An intuitive graphical interface for building the query graphs is available via the Treebank.info project.

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