syntactic tree

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

a hierarchical tree structure representing the syntactic structure of a sentence, with nodes corresponding to syntactic constituents or words and arcs representing syntactic relationships; the two major types of syntactic trees are constituency trees (phrase structure trees) and dependency trees; constituency trees, rooted in the Chomskyan tradition, represent the hierarchical grouping of words into phrases (noun phrase, verb phrase, prepositional phrase) and phrases into clauses and sentences, with terminal nodes being words and non-terminal nodes being phrasal categories; dependency trees represent the binary grammatical relationships (subject, object, modifier) between individual words, with one word — the root — dominating all others; syntactic trees are produced by parsers and provide representations that capture the grammatical structure necessary for semantic interpretation, information extraction, machine translation, and many other downstream NLP tasks; treebanks — corpora annotated with syntactic trees by linguists — are the training and evaluation resource for syntactic parsers

Examples

• The constituency syntactic tree for 'the cat sat on the mat' shows a noun phrase 'the cat' and a verb phrase 'sat on the mat' as the two daughters of the sentence node.
• Universal Dependencies provides dependency-annotated syntactic trees for over 100 languages in a unified cross-linguistic annotation scheme.