Nominaldepends

Nominaldepends is a term used in computational linguistics to describe an approach or data format for encoding nominal dependencies within syntactic annotations. It is not a widely standardized format, but appears in discussions and tools that emphasize the role of nominals (nouns and pronouns) in sentence structure.

Conceptually, nominaldepends centers on representing nominals as primary units in a dependency graph. In this model, nodes typically correspond to nominal elements and may carry features such as case, number, or gender. Edges encode grammatical relations between nominals and their governing words, allowing researchers to analyze how noun-centered relationships organize sentences. The format generally supports common serialization forms such as JSON, YAML, or XML, aiming to be interoperable with existing annotation ecosystems.

Usage and implementations often aim to complement broader syntactic representations by providing a more explicit focus on nominal interactions. This can aid tasks such as nominal phrase refactoring, coreference linkage involving nominals, or language studies where noun-based dependencies are of particular interest. Toolchains that adopt nominaldepends may export or import data alongside other annotation schemes, making it possible to compare nominal graphs with more traditional dependency trees or treebanks.

Example

{

"sentence": "The cat sleeps",

"dependencies": [

{"head": 3, "relation": "nsubj", "dependent": 2},

{"head": 1, "relation": "det", "dependent": 2}

]

}

See also: dependency grammar, CoNLL-U, universal dependencies, syntactic annotation, nominal phrase.