MINIPAR Basic Kit

MINIPAR is a broad-coverage parser for the English language. An evaluation with the SUSANNE corpus shows that MINIPAR achieves about 88% precision and 80% recall with respect to dependency relationships. MINIPAR is very efficient, on a Pentium II 300 with 128MB memory, it parses about 300 words per second.

PDEMO

A program named pdemo is included in this distribution as demonstration program. This program reads each line in the the standard input as a sentence and prints out the parse tree of the sentence. The program is evoked with:

pdemo [-c] [-r] [-l] [-p MINIPATH] [-f "feature feature ..."] < file

Options:

-p MINIPAR_PATH (requiered if MINIPATH is not defined)
-c constituency
-f features to print
-i do not print prompt
-l print relation with parent
-r root of words
-t table format

GRAMMATICAL CATEGORIES

The meanings of grammatical categories are explained as follows:

Det: Determiners
PreDet: Pre-determiners (search for PreDet in data/wndict.lsp for instances)
PostDet: Post-determiners (search for PostDet in data/wndict.lsp for instances)
NUM: numbers
C: Clauses
I: Inflectional Phrases
V: Verb and Verb Phrases
N: Noun and Noun Phrases
NN: noun-noun modifiers
P: Preposition and Preposition Phrases
PpSpec: Specifiers of Preposition Phrases (search for PpSpec
in data/wndict.lsp for instances)
A: Adjective/Adverbs
Have: have
Aux: Auxilary verbs, e.g. should, will, does, …
Be: Different forms of be: is, am, were, be, …
COMP: Complementizer
VBE: be used as a linking verb. E.g., I am hungry
V_N verbs with one argument (the subject), i.e., intransitive verbs
V_N_N verbs with two arguments, i.e., transitive verbs
V_N_I verbs taking small clause as complement

GRAMMATICAL RELATIONSHIPS

The following is a list of all the grammatical relationships in
Minipar. Search for (dep-type relation) in data/minipar.lsp for the
meaning of relation.

appo “ACME president, –appo-> P.W. Buckman”
aux “should <-aux– resign”
be “is <-be– sleeping”
c “that <-c– John loves Mary”
comp1 first complement
det “the <-det `– hat”
gen “Jane’s <-gen– uncle”
have “have <-have– disappeared”
i the relationship between a C clause and its I clause
inv-aux inverted auxiliary: “Will <-inv-aux– you stop it?
inv-be inverted be: “Is <-inv-be– she sleeping”
inv-have inverted have: “Have <-inv-have– you slept”
mod the relationship between a word and its adjunct modifier
pnmod post nominal modifier
p-spec specifier of prepositional phrases
pcomp-c clausal complement of prepositions
pcomp-n nominal complement of prepositions
post post determiner
pre pre determiner
pred predicate of a clause
rel relative clause
vrel passive verb modifier of nouns
wha, whn, whp: wh-elements at C-spec positions
obj object of verbs
obj2 second object of ditransitive verbs
subj subject of verbs
s surface subject