Characteristics of the Ukrainian language in AX Semantics
Fundamentals
In Ukrainian, you need to know the gender and animacy of a noun to form (together with number and case) the accompanying adjectives, determiners, numerals, and pronouns correctly.
Ukrainian has three genders for nouns: masculine, feminine, and neuter. Masculine nouns also differentiate between animate and inanimate. There are two numbers: singular and plural. Additionally, Ukrainian has seven cases for nouns.
| grammatical name | values | examples |
|---|---|---|
| gender | masculine inanimate | старий будинок (old house) |
| masculine animate | старий лікар (old doctor) | |
| feminine | стара жінка (old woman) | |
| neuter | старе місце (old place) | |
| number | singular | великий будинок (big house) |
| plural | великі будинки (big houses) | |
| cases (noun) | nominative | жінка (woman) |
| genitive | голос жінки. (The voice of the woman.) | |
| dative | Він дарує жінці. квіти (He gives flowers to the girl.) | |
| accusative | Він бачить жінку. (He sees the woman.) | |
| instrumental | Він іде з жінкою. (He goes with the woman.) | |
| locative | Дитина лежить на жінці. (The child lies on the woman.) | |
| vocative | Жінко! (Woman!) | |
| adjectives (noun) | before noun | гарний дім (nice home) |
| verb tenses | present | живе (he/she lives) |
| past | воно жив (he lived) | |
| future | буде жити (he will live) |
The standard order of a noun phrase in Ukrainian is the following:
preposition + determiner + numeral + adjective + noun.
See for example:
про ці три популярні книги
about these three popular books[pl,acc]
PREP DET NUM ADJ NOUN
"about these three popular books"
Lexicon
Nouns
For Ukrainian nouns, the lexicon needs to encode gender, animacy and preposition changes. If a lexicon entry is missing, the NLG platform tries to find the most probable gender based on heuristics. The number x case forms of a noun should be added to the lexicon if they are not regular.
Lexicon entries for nouns may also be necessary for inflecting determiners, adjectives, numerals and pronouns correctly. They are omitted, if a lexicon entry is required, but missing.
Examples
The basic lexicon entry for будинок (house) contains:
- gender/animacy: male inanimate
- inflection table for case and number:
| Singular | Plural | |
|---|---|---|
| Nominative | буди́нок | буди́нки |
| Genitive | буди́нку | буди́нків |
| Dative | буди́нкові | буди́нкам |
| Accusative | буди́нок | буди́нки |
| Instrumental | буди́нком | буди́нками |
| Locative | буди́нкові | буди́нках |
| Vocative | буди́нку | буди́нки |
Note
If you need lexicon entries for countries, write to the support about that and you will get them for Ukrainian with automatic handling of prepositions.
Adjectives
In the lexicon, the inflection table for gender, animacy, case, and number can be encoded. For adjective position, the default is "before noun".
Verbs
The most common verbs are encoded in our software. If a verb inflects the wrong way, you should add it to the lexicon.
Please note that the future tense can be formed by taking the present tense conjugation of the verb бути and using it with the infinitive of the verb.
See for example the verb їсти (to eat):
вони будуть їсти
(they will eat)
Container settings
Determiner
The AX NLG platform supports the following determiners for Ukrainian: demonstrative, proximal, and possessive.
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.
| cardinal | ordinal | |
|---|---|---|
| text | дев'ять днів (nine days) | дев'ятий день (the ninth day) |
| digit | 9 днів (9 days) | 9-й день (the 9th day) |
For Ukrainian, both cardinal and ordinal numerals are written out until 10 on the platform, otherwise (above 10) the output is in digit form. Take cardinal numerals for example:
десять автомобілів
(ten cars)
vs.
11 автомобілів
(11 cars)
In Ukrainian, case and number for noun/adjective change based on numerals, for example:
| Numeral | case / number | example |
|---|---|---|
| 1 (also numbers ending in 1, excluding 11) | Nominative/Singular | 1 будинок (1 house) 21 будинок (21 houses) |
| 2-4 (also numbers ending in 2-4, excluding 12-14) | Nominative/Plural | 3 будинки (3 houses) 23 будинки (23 houses) |
| >= 5 | Genitive/Plural | 7 будинків (7 houses) |
Prepositions
If users configure prepositions in the container, they are automatically adapted, if phonetic assimilation needs to happen. As the below example shows, the preposition з changes to зі before words starting with a sibilant (like ш in the example below) + another consonant (like к in the example).
з Аргентини
(from Argentina)
зі школи
(from school)
Preposition switch
On the AX NLG platform the settings for the container Німеччина (Germany) are: preposition="в" and case="acc".
в Німеччині
(in Germany)
For the below sentence but with a different country (i.e. the Philippines), the platform settings are the same as above (preposition="в", case="acc"), but the lexical information changes the result and shows a preposition switch from в to на:
на Філіппінах
(in the Philippines)