Structure of Language

In the next four videos I’m going to be talking - at a very high level - about how graphs can be used for working in different problem domains. Rather than focusing on formalism or definitions, I want to show you how graphs can be used. Hopefully this will help you use graphs to solve problems that you encounter.

In this video we’ll be seeing how trees are used to model linguistic structure.

Important: You will not be tested on the problem domain! I do not expect you to learn about the structure of language. If this video is helpful to you, great! If not, don’t worry about it!

Seven-minute video

You can also view this video on YouTube


Key Points

  1. The structure of language can be represented as a tree of words and phrases.
  2. This is helpful for understanding how language works, and also doing natural langauge processing.
  3. A tree is a very common type of graph that starts from a root node and branches out at each node
  4. Trees group nodes together into a heirarchical structure.
  5. Each node in a binary branching tree will have at most 2 branches. In other words, each node has either 0, 1, or 2 children.

Questions

Check your understanding

Look at the graph and answer the questions below. You can manipulate the graph by dragging the nodes.

Graph 1:

Graph 2:

Graph 3:

Graph 4:

Which of these graphs are trees?

Check Answers

Which of these graphs are binary branching trees?

Check Answers

Which of the following properties apply to all of the trees above?

Check Answers


Summary

In this section we have seen how language is structured like a tree, which is a kind of graph.

  • You should be able to identify and draw a tree
  • You should know that trees are a tool of analysis and problem solving in many domains

In the next section we are going to see another application of graphs, this time to game AI.