<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<Paper uid="E99-1052">
  <Title>Determination of Syntactic Functions in Estonian Constraint Grammar</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The main idea of the Constraint Grammar (Karlsson, 1990) is that it determines the surface-level syntactic analysis of the text which has gone through prior morphological analysis. The process of syntactic analysis consists of three stages: morphological disambiguation, identification of clause boundaries, and identification of syntactic functions of words. This article focuses on the last module in detail. Grammatical features of words are presented in the forms of tags which are attached to words. The tags indicate the inflectional and derivational properties of the word and the word class membership, the tags attached during the last stage of the analysis indicate its syntactic functions. The underlying principle in determining both the morphological interpretation and the syntactic functions is the same: first all the possible labels are attached to words and then the ones that do not fit the context are removed by applying special rules or constraints. Constraint Grammar consists of hand written rules which by checking the context decide whether an interpretation is correct or has to be removed.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Constraint Grammar seemed to suit best for the analysis of Estonian texts because its mechanism is simple and easily implementable, it can be well adapted for the Estonian language, it is at the same time sufficiently reliable (robust) and the resulting syntactic analysis that the Grammar gives suits various practical applications.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>