Stanford typed dependencies manual
Marie-Catherine de Marneffe and Christopher D. Manning
September 2008
Revised for the Stanford Parser v. 3.7.0+ in September 2016
Please note that this manual describes the original Stanford Dependencies representation. As of ver-
sion 3.5.2, the default representation output by the Stanford Parser and Stanford CoreNLP is the new
Universal Dependencies (UD) representation, and we no longer actively develop the original Stanford
Dependencies representation. For a description of the UD representation, take a look at the Universal De-
pendencies documentation at http:/www.universaldependencies.org and the discussion of the enhanced
and enhanced++ UD representations by Schuster and Manning (2016).
1 Introduction
The Stanford typed dependencies representation was designed to provide a simple description of the
grammatical relationships in a sentence that can easily be understood and effectively used by people
without linguistic expertise who want to extract textual relations. In particular, rather than the phrase
structure representations that have long dominated in the computational linguistic community, it repre-
sents all sentence relationships uniformly as typed dependency relations. That is, as triples of a relation
between pairs of words, such as “the subject of distributes is Bell.” Our experience is that this simple,
uniform representation is quite accessible to non-linguists thinking about tasks involving information
extraction from text and is effective in relation extraction applications.
Here is an example sentence:
Bell, based in Los Angeles, makes and distributes electronic, computer and building prod-
ucts.
For this sentence, the Stanford Dependencies (SD) representation is:
nsubj(makes-8, Bell-1)
nsubj(distributes-10, Bell-1)
vmod(Bell-1, based-3)
nn(Angeles-6, Los-5)
prep in(based-3, Angeles-6)
root(ROOT-0, makes-8)
conj and(makes-8, distributes-10)
amod(products-16, electronic-11)
conj and(electronic-11, computer-13)
amod(products-16, computer-13)
conj and(electronic-11, building-15)
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