Example: transduction

The second example shows the recognition of certain sentence patterns and their transduction to Head/Modifier pairs [head, modifier]. The transduction mechanism allows the production of a (compositional) translation instead of a parse tree. For each alternative of the rule, a transduction can be specified preceded by a slash.

NUMB:: sing | plur.
PERS:: first | secnd | third.
TRAN:: intrans | trans.

RULE sentence:
   subject(NUMB, PERS),
     verb part (intrans, NUMB, PERS) /
      "[", subject, ",", verb part, "]";

The transitivity feature of the verb determines whether it takes an object. Assuming a suitable transduction for subject and verb part, this rule would transduce I am freezing to [I, freeze].

RULE sentence:
   subject(NUMB, PERS),
     verb part (trans,NUMB,PERS), object /
   "[",subject,",[",verb part,",",object,"]]".

Under similar assumptions, this should transduce I was attending a software engineering conference to [ I, [attend, [conference, software engineering]]].