Basic description

DepPattern is a formalism to write dependency grammars. The DepPattern compiler, called Compi, generates robust parsers from DepPattern grammars. The use of the DepPattern compiler is described in the user guide. It has been brought under the GNU General Public License.

A specific DepPattern grammar is constituted by a set of context dependent rules. Every rule is aimed to identify a specific dependent-head relation by means of a pattern of Parts-of-Speech tags. A rule is constituted by two elements:

• a pattern of PoS tags
• the name of a head-dependent relation found within the pattern

Let's see an example:

Adjunct : ADJ NOUN

%

The first element is "Adjunct", which stands for the name of a dependency relation. Any name can be used for any dependency, only if it was previously declared in the corresponding configuration file (see Section 1.2). The second element is a sequence of PoS tags, which we call "pattern". A pattern must consist of, at least, two tags: the one representing the dependent expression and the other representing the head. Names for tags are declared in the corresponding configuration file (see Section 1.3).

Both, the dependency name and the pattern are separated by two dots (:). Symbol % represents the end of the rule. It is always possible to make use of regular expression operators to tune any character or string : ?,[ ]*, [^ ], etc.