Scope

The UNL representation is a hyper-graph and may consist of several interlinked or subordinate sub-graphs, which are used to define the boundaries and the scope of the semantic entities being represented. These sub-graphs correspond roughly to the concept of "clauses", i.e., groups of words that consist of a subject and a predicate. For instance, the sentence "Mary saw Peter when John arrived" is represented, in UNL, as follows:

In the above, the dependent clause "John arrived" is represented as a hyper-node linked to the main clause by the relation "tim" (which corresponds to the value of the conjunction "when"). In the UNL table representation, hyper-nodes are indexed by ":XX", where XX is a two-digit hyper-node index. The main node index is :00 and may be omitted. Hyper-node indexes must also be associated to every relation inside the node.

agt:00(saw, Mary) or agt(saw,Mary)
obj:00(saw, Peter) or obj(saw,Peter)
tim:00(saw, :01) or tim(saw, :01)
agt:01(arrived, John)