MarsaGram: an excursion in the forests of parsing trees

Abstract

The question of how to compare languages and more generally the domain of linguistic typology, relies on the study of different linguistic properties or phenomena. Classically, such a comparison is done semi-manually, for example by extracting information from databases such as the WALS. However, it remains difficult to identify precisely regular parameters, available for different languages, that can be used as a basis towards modeling. We propose in this paper, focusing on the question of syntactic typology, a method for automatically extracting such parameters from treebanks, bringing them into a typology perspective. We present the method and the tools for inferring such information and navigating through the treebanks. The approach has been applied to 10 languages of the Universal Dependencies Treebank. We approach is evaluated by showing how automatic classification correlates with language families.

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