A formal framework for linguistic tree query

This thesis identifies a comprehensive set of linguistic tree query requirements and the level of expressiveness needed to implement them and studies formalisms used by linguists and database theorists to describe tree structured data.

Abstract

The analysis of human communication, in all its forms, increas-ingly depends on large collections of texts and transcribed record-ings. These collections, or corpora, are often richly annotated with structural information. These data sets are extremely large so manual analysis is only successful up to a point. As such, sig-nificant effort has recently been invested in automatic techniques for extracting and analyzing these massive data sets. However, further progress on analytical tools is confronted by three major challenges. First, we need the right data model. Second, we need to understand the theoretical foundations of query languages on that data model. Finally, we need to know the expressive requirements for general purpose query language with respect to linguistics. This thesis has addressed all three of these issues. Specifically, this thesis studies formalisms used by linguists and