On a Noun-Driven Syntactic Paradigm

In addressing a verb bias in syntactic analysis we present the beginnings of a noun-driven analysis paradigm. Such a paradigm may complement and compensate for some weaknesses in the existing verb-driven paradigm (in which the noun is subordinated) as applied to information sources or contexts in which the data is structured in objects and more than in events. The Current Paradigm In analysis of text and speech, the verb is privileged over the noun as the major determiner in syntactic and semantic structure. Noun and prepositional phrases that provide information on the participants, locations, and manners are analyzed as dependent upon the verb in some way. This is made more explicit in dependency grammars, where the verbs are typically the first nodes to be accessed in a traversal of the tree, and access to all of the other nodes proceeds through at least one verb. In constituencygrammar tree structures, the verb is “floated” nearer the root of the tree, as compared to nouns. For example, a noun may appear at the same height as the verb if it forms the subject noun phrase; the addition of adjectives, nouns, and other recursive structures continues to bury the “lowest” noun (which may be the most important, as it may be the “root” of the noun phrase: in “cat food tray”, the object referenced a tray and its preceding nouns further information about what [or which] tray it is). As well, since any prepositional phrases attached to the verb phrase, and all objects of the verb (direct and indirect), are attached under the verb phrase structure, we see the verb floated highest in the tree structure. For computational processing of this tree, the verb is encountered first, and determination of the meaning of the sentence must most efficiently make sense of the first information available; hence, even if the verb is not explicitly centered in semantic processing, its Copyright © 2013, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved. primacy in the syntactic structures may enforce such centering. In analyses on the syntax-semantics interface, noun and prepositional phrases (whose objects are also noun phrases) are analyzed as arguments to the major structure, which is the verb. One exception to this analysis is in the case of “to be”: in copula sentences, the verb is no longer as important: it is demoted and its syntactic complement is promoted to the status of predicate. This exception only proves the rule: verbs are predicates, unless they are not strong enough, in which case an adjective or nominal will be given special dispensation to act like a verb in assigning roles (Baker, 2005). Further, and probably related, the semantic centering of verbs lines natural language reasoning up with first-order predicate logic (Raskin, 1983). In this case, the predicate can be thought of as a function, with its called arguments the syntactic arguments (there is probably no coincidence that they are named similarly) required in its surface form. Much work has been done in fitting natural language and predicate logic together, as in (Luuk, 2009).