Syntactic Parse Tree

A tree-shaped data structure that represents the grammatical structure of a sentence according to a formal grammar. Internal nodes correspond to phrases (noun phrase, verb phrase, clause, sentence) and leaves correspond to individual words or signs. Parse trees are produced automatically by syntactic parsers and are used in many accessibility technologies: text-simplification systems use them to identify complex constructions that can be broken apart, sign-language animation systems use them to decide where to place pauses at linguistically significant boundaries, and captioning systems use them to break long utterances into readable chunks.