Characteristics of the Slovak language in AX Semantics

Fundamentals

In Slovak, you need to know the gender of a noun to form (together with number and case) the accompanying adjectives, determiners, numerals, and pronouns correctly.

Slovak has three genders for nouns: masculine (animate and inanimate), feminine and neuter. There are two numbers: singular and plural. Additionally, Slovak has six cases for nouns.

grammatical namevaluesexamples
gendermasculine inanimatestaré auto
(an old car)
masculine animatestarý lekár
(an old doctor)
femininestará žena
(an old woman)
neuterstaré mesto
(an old town)
numbersingularstaré auto
(the old car)
pluralstaré autá
(the old cars)
cases (noun)nominativepes
(dog)
accusativeVidím psa.
(I see the dog.)
dativeDám psovi loptu.
(I give the ball to the dog.)
genitiveZvonček psa
(dog' bell)
locativeVták pristane na psovi.
(The bird lands on the dog.)
instrumentalSlepec chodí so psom.
(The blind man walks with a dog.)
adjectives (noun)before nounčervený dom
(red house)
verb tensespresentOn robí
(he does)
pastOn robil
(he did)
participle passiverobený
(done)
futureOn bude robiť
(he will be doing)

The standard order of a noun phrase in Slovak is the following:

preposition + determiner + numeral + adjective + noun

See for example:

o      týchto  troch  populárnych  knihách
about  these   three  popular      book
PREP   DET     NUM    ADJ          NOUN
"about these three popular books"

Lexicon

Nouns

Slovak nouns are inflected for number and case. Lexicon entries for nouns may also be necessary for inflecting determiners, adjectives and pronouns correctly. They are omitted, if a lexicon entry is required, but missing.

Examples

The basic lexicon entry for pes (dog) contains:

  • gender: masculine animate
  • inflection table for case and number:
SingularPlural
Nominativepespsi
Accusativepsapsov
Dativepsovipsom
Genitivepsapsov
Locativepsovipsoch
Instrumentalpsompsami

Note

If you need lexicon entries for countries, write to the support about that and you will get them for Slovak with automatic handling of prepositions.

Adjectives

In the lexicon, the inflection table encodes gender, case, and number. For adjective position, the default is "before noun".

Verbs

Slovak verbs inflect for person, number, tense, and in some cases gender. The most common verbs are encoded in our software. If a verb inflects incorrectly, you should add it to the lexicon.

Please note that the future tense can be formed in two ways. For imperfective verbs it is formed by taking the future tense conjugation of the verb byť (to be) and the infinitive (only the conjugated form needs to be in a container). For perfective verbs, the present form expresses the future. See for example the verbs robiť and urobiť:

budem robiť
(I will do [imperfective])
urobím
(I will do [perfective])

The participle passive is a verb form that can be used to build constructions in the passive voice. The AX platform will inflect the participle passive automatically:

Mária postavila dom. = Maria built the house. (active)
Dom bol postavený. = The house was built. (passive)

Container settings

Determiner

The AX NLG platform supports the following determiners for Slovak: demonstrative, distal, proximal, possessive, and quantifier (every).

Numerals

The noun will automatically agree with the numeral number when a numeral variable is used. Four types of numerals are possible on the AX NLG platform: cardinal, cardinal as digit, ordinal, and ordinal as digit.

cardinalordinal
textjeden deň
(one day)
prvý deň
(the first day)
digit1 deň
(1 day)
1. deň
(the 1st day)

In Slovak, case and number for nouns and adjectives change based on numerals (if no other case than nominative or accusative is set). See for example:

Numeralcase / numberexample
1Nominative Singular1 červený dom
(1 red house)
2-4Nominative/Plural3 červené domy
(3 red houses)
>= 5Genitive/Plural7 červených domov
(7 red houses)

For Slovak, both cardinal and ordinal numerals are written out until 12 on the platform, otherwise (above 12) the output is in digit form. Take cardinal numerals for example:

dvanásť áut
(12 cars)
vs.
13 áut
(13 cars)

Prepositions

If users configure prepositions in the container, they are automatically adapted when vocalization is required. As the below example shows, the container settings for both examples are: preposition="z". However, o is added after s/z/v, if the next word starts with a similar or the same letter.

z domu
(from the house)
zo záhrady
(from the garden)

Preposition switch

On the AX NLG platform, the settings for the container Nemecko (Germany) are: preposition="v" and case="loc".

v Nemecku
(in Germany)

For the below sentence with a different place (i.e. Island (Iceland)), the platform settings are the same as above (preposition="v", case="loc"), but the lexical information changes the preposition and shows a switch from v to na:

na Islande
(in Iceland)