Construction Grammar Based Annotation Framework for Parsing Tamil

Syntactic parsing in NLP is the task of working out the grammatical structure of sentences. Some of the purely formal approaches to parsing such as phrase structure grammar, dependency grammar have been successfully employed for a variety of languages. While phrase structure based constituent analysis is possible for fixed order languages such as English, dependency analysis between the grammatical units have been suitable for many free word order languages. These approaches rely on identifying the linguistic units based on their formal syntactic properties and establishing the relationships between such units in the form of a tree. Instead, we characterize every morphosyntactic unit as a mapping between form and function on the lines of Construction Grammar and parsing as identification of dependency relations between such conceptual units. Our approach to parser annotation shows an average MALT LAS score of 82.21% on Tamil gold annotated corpus of 935 sentences in a five-fold validation experiment.