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Cool. What is the measure of word dependency? I.e., I'll agree that in

John threw the trash out

"threw" and "out" are dependent on one another. But is that an either/or, or are there degrees? It seems like "threw" and "trash" are also "dependent" in that they don't make independent sense.

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Specifically, we used hand-parsed corpora developed by Google and a whole bunch of computational linguists over the last 15 years.

The dependency representation is of course an incomplete picture of how words hang together in a sentence. But it's the only format that's flexible enough that you could dream of parsing 37 languages to (approximately) the same standard.

All your replies in this thread are more clear/interesting than the original linked article.

Very cool stuff.

They used sentence dependency graphs - in this sentence "John", "trash" and "out" are dependencies of "threw". There's a few variants, but the graph construction rules are standardised.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_grammar

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