Determination of Syntactic Functions in Estonian Constraint Grammar

This article describes the current state of syntactic analysis of Estonian using Constraint Grammar. Constraint Grammar framework divides parsing into two different modules: morphological disambiguation and determination of syntactic functions. This article focuses on the last module in detail. If the morphological disambiguator achieves the precision more than 85% and error rate is smaller than 2% then 80-88% of words becomes syntactically unambiguous. The error rate of parser is 1-4% depending on the ambiguity rate of input. The main goal of this work is to elaborate an efficient parser for Estonian and annotate the Corpus of Estonian Written Texts syntactically. It is the first attempt to write a parser for Estonian.