Inter-word flux #27
Description
The flux in a position P is the set of dependencies linking a word before P with a word after P.
A position can be the position of a word or a position between two words (= an interword position). Interword positions are particularly interesting in spoken corpora because they correspond to prosodic frontiers (or even pauses).
In the flux, we are specially interested in the roof of P, which is the smallest dependency in the flux of P. For instance, a simple punctuation P (as opposed to a double punctuation) is always attached the dependent node of the roof of P (also called the bottom of the roof).
In spoken corpus, we can be interested by some characteristics of the roof of an interword position: its label, its length, the span of its dependent. Such pieces of information can be linked with prosodic markers. We can also associate prosodic information to an interword position P: the duration of the pause, the gap between the F0 before and after P, etc.
Note that the flux is totally ordered if the tree is projective. If the tree is non projective, the roof can be not defined, because two edges cross each other above P. Non projective fluxes are also interesting to identify.
Some important features can be associated to a flux: the flux size is the number of dependencies in the flux. The flux weight is the maximal number of disjoint dependencies in the flux. (Two edges are disjoints if they do not share any vertex.)