From Prosodic Trees to Syntactic Trees

This paper describes an ongoing effort to parse the Hebrew Bible. The parser consults the bracketing information extracted from the cantillation marks of the Masoetic text. We first constructed a cantillation treebank which encodes the prosodic structures of the text. It was found that many of the prosodic boundaries in the cantillation trees correspond, directly or indirectly, to the phrase boundaries of the syntactic trees we are trying to build. All the useful boundary information was then extracted to help the parser make syntactic decisions, either serving as hard constraints in rule application or used probabilistically in tree ranking. This has greatly improved the accuracy and efficiency of the parser and reduced the amount of manual work in building a Hebrew treebank.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: ACL
• Authors: Andi Wu, Kirk Lowery
• Keywords: ACL 2006, ACL 2007, Cantillation, Cantillation Treebank, Parser Make Syntactic