Algorithm of Constituency Tree from Dependency Tree Construction for a Russian-Language Sentence

Abstract

Automatic syntactic analysis of a sentence is an important computational linguistics task. At present, there are no syntactic structure parsers for Russian that are publicly available and suitable for practical applications. Ground-up creation of such parsers requires building of a treebank annotated according to a given formal grammar, which is quite a cumbersome task. However, since there are several syntactic dependency parsers for Russian, it seems reasonable to employ dependency parsing results for syntactic structure analysis. The article introduces an algorithm that allows to construct the constituency tree of a Russian sentence by a syntactic dependency tree. The formal grammar used by the algorithm is based on the D.E. Rosenthal’s classic reference. The algorithm was evaluated on 300 Russian-language sentences. 200 of them were selected from the aforementioned reference, and 100 from OpenCorpora, an open corpus of sentences extracted from Russian news and periodicals. During the evaluation, the sentences were passed to syntactic dependency parsers from Stanza, SpaCy, and Natasha packages, then the resulted dependency trees were processed by the proposed algorithm. The obtained constituency trees were compared with the trees manually annotated by experts in linguistics. The best performance was achieved using the Stanza parser: the constituency parsing F1–score was 0.85, and the sentence parts tagging accuracy was 0.93, that would be sufficient for many practical applications, such as event extraction, information retrieval and sentiment analysis.