Sentence diagram generation using dependency parsing

Abstract

Dependency parsers show syntactic relations between words using a directed graph, but comparing dependency parsers is difficult because of differences in theoretical models. We describe a system to convert dependency models to a structural grammar used in grammar education. Doing so highlights features that are potentially overlooked in the dependency graph, as well as exposing potential weaknesses and limitations in parsing models. Our system performs automated analysis of dependency relations and uses them to populate a data structure we designed to emulate sentence diagrams. This is done by mapping dependency relations between words to the relative positions of those words in a sentence diagram. Using an original metric for judging the accuracy of sentence diagrams, we achieve precision of 85%. Multiple causes for errors are presented as potential areas for improvement in dependency parsers. © 2009 ACL and AFNLP.