Criteria for the Identification of Adverbial Phrases for Tamil

Computational Linguistics is a branch of linguistics which deals with the computer and its linguistic levels. It is also regarded as a branch of language studies which applies computer techniques to the linguistic field. In Computational Linguistics, Natural Language Processing plays an important role, which developed because of the invention of Information Technology. In computational syntax, the syntactic analyser breaks a sentence into phrases and clauses, identifying the sentence by its syntactic information. ‘The sentence level analysis gives the information about the sentence, like whether it is simple, compound or complex’ (Ganesan, 2005; 80). Tamil language is spoken among one of the ethnic groups in Malaysia. As a language, Tamil rose during the Tamil Chola Dynasty period of 11th Century. Today Indians form the third largest ethnic group in Malaysia after Malays and Chinese, constituting 8% of the total Malaysian population. In Tamil syntax, Tamil is classified into six phrases:1.Noun Phrase2.Verb Phrase3.Adjectival Phrase4.Adverbial Phrase5.Quantifier Phrase6.Postpositional PhraseIn computational syntax, the first step is to provide required information regarding the head and the constituent of each phrase. This information now canbe incorporated with this system using programming languages. Now the system can easily analyse a given sentence with the criteria or mechanisms given to it. The major objective of this paper will be to provide the essential criteria or mechanisms to the computer to identify the adverbial phrase in Tamil language.