To symplify some linguistic analyses, DepPattern also allows to define dependencies between two words (a head and a dependent) where the syntactic relation between them is lexicalized. In this cases, there is a third gramatical word used as dependency relator. For instance, we can consider that the expression "man with glasses" contains a open-choice dependency between "man" and "glasses" marked by prepostion "with", which is here a kind of binary relator. Obviously, such an expression can also be represented in a more standard way, by means of two basic dependencies (“with” and “glasses”, “man” and “with”). Likewise, the expression “if it rains, I go” can contain an open-choice dependency between “rains” and “go”, linked by the conjunction “if”. These are called complex open-choice dependencies.
It would be possible to also find examples of complex lexical dependencies. For instance, “have to eat” could be analysed as an idiomatic dependency between “have” and “eat”, related by means of particle “to”. However, these dependency types are not implemented in the current version of the DepPattern compiler.
The types implemented are the following complex open-choice dependencies:
- DepRelHead
- HeadRelDep
- DepHeadRel
- HeadDepRel
- RelDepHead
- RelHeadDep
Complex dependencies are, in fact, constituted by single binary dependencies. They can be used as syntactic-semantic short-cuts in order to simplify the analysis.
