BUNDLES AND SYNTACTIC ANALYSIS 
Dorothee Reim~un 
Zentraltnstitut f~Lr Sprachwtssenschaft AdW DDR, Berlin 
Syntactic analysis - in our terms - means to construct 
a description of the syntactic structures of a given sentence, 
starting from a formal description of the syntactic features 
of .the wordfo~ (the -result of a preceding wordform ane.lysls). 
The description of the syntactic structure as well as the 
formal description of the wordfo~ms have to follow a certain 
model, in our case the Dependency Gre~nme~ by ~NZE (1975)o 
A central point of the model - in respect 4o analysis 
- ere the so-called bundles. They represent the necessary 
syntactic knowledge of a language which is the base for anal- 
ysi~ sentences of this le~guage. The bundles ere parts of 
trees in a very generalized form. If 
RI  R3" 
N 1 N 2 N 3 
is a bundle, then it means, that there are conditions for the 
nodes NO, N 1, N2, N 3, that there are relations between the • 
nodes expressed by the edses and their markings R 1 , ~, R 3 
and that there is some order condition for the nodes, in the 
example 1; 1 N 2 N O N 3. Following the model, these bundles give 
us a high measure of surety, for the analysis. 
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The bundles are stored in the system in a very concentr- 
ated form. For example for a noun group with a noun like "tab- 
le" at the top there is only one budle with all possible 
facultative nodes. So we have in a bundle informations about 
the mode of occurrence of a node, i.e. if a node is obligatory, 
facultative etc. 
The bundles serve also as description for the dominance 
behaviour of wordforms (one part of the formal description 
of their features), thus we have a strong connection between 
a bundle and a wordformwhich can"stand" at the top of the 
bundle. For this purpose ~he bundles have a special external 
shape for linguistic work. For instance, a finite verb form 
of the German verb Sschreiben" has several bundles in its 
dominance component, one of these is 
FIN (ACT°A 0BJ3fA (PAT ~ DAS) °) 
FIN - means, that the top is a finite verb form 
ACT ° - there must be an actor (subject) 
OBJ3 f - there can be an indirect object 
(PATA DAS) °- there mue__~t be a direct object, 
either in the form of a noun group in 
" the accusative case (PAT) or as a sub- 
• ordinate clause with the conjunction 
"dase" (DAS) 
Free modifications llke local and temporal circumstances 
are possible as well. 
Of course, in the syntactic analysis system the bundles 
have another shape and~they contain more lnformatione 
There are two possibilities to use the bundles for syn- 
tactic analysis, the first one is to use them as proper rules, 
the eeco~ one is to use other methods, but to have the bundl- 
es as syntactic knowledge in the back@round. The first possib- 
ility is outlined in my dissertation (AROLD 1976) as a strong 
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where 
bottom-up and multiple-path analys£8. But for a working 
system we intend to follow the second way. 
In the paper a short summary of the system will be given. 
The syntactic analysts, of a sentence ~£ven by the formal de- 
scription of the syntactic features of the wordforms iS made 
by three steps. These three steps differ one from the other 
by d~fferent methods. 
In the first step an nau~nented transition network n 
(ATe) is used to construct a rough structure of the sentence. 
The second step uses the bundles which are members of t he 
dominance component of the wordforms to find out so-called 
subordlnntion possibllitiee. The result of the second step is 
a loop-free ~raph, which is transformed dur£ng the third step 
to a ~aph contusing the dependency treem which desor£be the 
syntactic structures of the an~yeed sentence. In the third 
step the conditions of the bundles (obligator7 and facultative 
nodes etc.) are used as well as the condlttonm com£n~ from 
the shape of the resulting graph. 
Up to now we ~re only at the be~nn~ng of the ~nplement- 
ation of the system. 3ome remake about these problems am 
well as about the difficulties to include the analysis of 
coordtnated sentences w~ll be made in the paper too. 
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