Abstract
Large databases of linguistic annotations are used for testing linguistic hypotheses and for training language processing models. These linguistic annotations are often syntactic or prosodic in nature, and have a hierarchical structure. Query languages are used to select particular structures of interest, or to project out large slices of a corpus for external analysis. Existing languages suffer from a variety of problems in the areas of expressiveness, efficiency, and naturalness for linguistic query. We describe the domain of linguistic trees and discuss the expressive requirements for a query language. Then we present a language that can express a wide range of queries over these trees, and show that the language is first-order complete over trees.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 53 |
| Pages (from-to) | 53-73 |
| Number of pages | 21 |
| Journal | Journal of Logic, Language and Information |
| Volume | 19 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Jan 2010 |
| Externally published | Yes |