What's the tags meaning of Stanford dependency parser(3.9.1)?

Question

I used the Stanford dependency parser(3.9.1) to parse a sentence, and I got the result as the following.

    [[(('investigating', 'VBG'), 'nmod', ('years', 'NNS')),
  (('years', 'NNS'), 'case', ('In', 'IN')),
  (('years', 'NNS'), 'det', ('the', 'DT')),
  (('years', 'NNS'), 'amod', ('last', 'JJ')),
  (('years', 'NNS'), 'nmod', ('century', 'NN')),
  (('century', 'NN'), 'case', ('of', 'IN')),
  (('century', 'NN'), 'det', ('the', 'DT')),
  (('century', 'NN'), 'amod', ('nineteenth', 'JJ')),
  (('investigating', 'VBG'), 'nsubj', ('Planck', 'NNP')),
  (('investigating', 'VBG'), 'aux', ('was', 'VBD')),
  (('investigating', 'VBG'), 'dobj', ('problem', 'NN')),
  (('problem', 'NN'), 'det', ('the', 'DT')),
  (('problem', 'NN'), 'nmod', ('radiation', 'NN')),
  (('radiation', 'NN'), 'case', ('of', 'IN')),
  (('radiation', 'NN'), 'amod', ('black-body', 'JJ')),
  (('radiation', 'NN'), 'acl', ('posed', 'VBN')),
  (('posed', 'VBN'), 'advmod', ('first', 'RB')),
  (('posed', 'VBN'), 'nmod', ('Kirchhoff', 'NNP')),
  (('Kirchhoff', 'NNP'), 'case', ('by', 'IN')),
  (('Kirchhoff', 'NNP'), 'advmod', ('earlier', 'RBR')),
  (('earlier', 'RBR'), 'nmod:npmod', ('years', 'NNS')),
  (('years', 'NNS'), 'det', ('some', 'DT')),
  (('years', 'NNS'), 'amod', ('forty', 'JJ'))]]

Some of the tags meaning such as 'nmod' and 'acl' are missing in the StanfordDependencyManual.The newest manual version I can find is 3.7.0. I also find some explanation at a Standard_list_of_dependency_relations But it still missed some tags.

Hence, my question is where can I find the newest version of the explanation of these tags? Thanks!

Answer 1

For the last few versions, the Stanford parser has been generating Universal Dependencies rather than Stanford Dependencies. The new relation set can be found here, and are listed below (for version 1 -- version 2 seems to be a work-in-progress still?):

acl: clausal modifier of noun
acl:relcl: relative clause modifier
advcl: adverbial clause modifier
advmod: adverbial modifier
amod: adjectival modifier
appos: appositional modifier
aux: auxiliary
auxpass: passive auxiliary
case: case marking
cc: coordination
cc:preconj: preconjunct
ccomp: clausal complement
compound: compound
compound:prt: phrasal verb particle
conj: conjunct
cop: copula
csubj: clausal subject
csubjpass: clausal passive subject
dep: dependent
det: determiner
det:predet: predeterminer
discourse: discourse element
dislocated: dislocated elements
dobj: direct object
expl: expletive
foreign: foreign words
goeswith: goes with
iobj: indirect object
list: list
mark: marker
mwe: multi-word expression
name: name
neg: negation modifier
nmod: nominal modifier
nmod:npmod: noun phrase as adverbial modifier
nmod:poss: possessive nominal modifier
nmod:tmod: temporal modifier
nsubj: nominal subject
nsubjpass: passive nominal subject
nummod: numeric modifier
parataxis: parataxis
punct: punctuation
remnant: remnant in ellipsis
reparandum: overridden disfluency
root: root
vocative: vocative
xcomp: open clausal complement

Although no longer maintained, you can get the old dependency format by setting the property depparse.language to English (see, e.g., here):

properties.setProperty("depparse.language", "English")