Grammatical agreement and automatic morphological disambiguation of inflectional languages

Abstract

This paper describes a part of one of the most important syntactic subsystems present in many inflectional languages – grammatical agreement – from the viewpoint of automatic morphological disambiguation of such languages. One of the languages on which the main ideas will be demonstrated is Czech which – due to its morphological and syntactic complexity – can be regarded as a representative of the inflectional subgroup of the Slavic language family. It will be shown that notwithstanding the intricacies of the syntax of Czech a deeper understanding of the nature of grammatical agreement can result in the development of surface syntax rules which can considerably contribute to solving the problem of automatic morphological disambiguation of texts stored in Czech corpora. Although the language being studied is only Czech the ideas presented seem to be applicable, mutatis mutandis, also to the morphological disambiguation of a similar type of languages, especially the Slavic ones.