Abstract syntax as interlingua: Scaling up the grammatical framework from controlled languages to robust pipelines

Syntax is an interlingual representation used in compilers. Grammatical Framework (GF) applies the abstract syntax idea to natural languages. The development of GF started in 1998, first as a tool for controlled language implementations, where it has gained an established position in both academic and commercial projects. GF provides grammar resources for over 40 languages, enabling accurate generation and translation, as well as grammar engineering tools and components for mobile and Web applications. On the research side, the focus in the last ten years has been on scaling up GF to wide-coverage language processing. The concept of abstract syntax offers a unified view on many other approaches: Universal Dependencies, WordNets, FrameNets, Construction Grammars, and Abstract Meaning Representations. This makes it possible for GF to utilize data from the other approaches and to build robust pipelines. In return, GF can contribute to data-driven approaches by methods to transfer resources from one language to others, to augment data by rule-based generation, to check the consistency of hand-annotated corpora, and to pipe analyses into high-precision semantic back ends. This article gives an overview of the use of abstract syntax as interlingua through both established and emerging NLP applications involving GF

Conference Program

Proceedings of the 18th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics NODALIDA 2011. Editors: Bolette Sandford Pedersen, Gunta Nešpore and Inguna Skadiņa. NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 11 (2011), xii-xvii. © 2011 The editors and contributors. Published by Northern European Association for Language Technology (NEALT) http://omilia.uio.no/nealt . Electronically published at Tartu University Library (Estonia) http://hdl.handle.net/10062/16955

Contents

Proceedings of the 18th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics NODALIDA 2011. Editors: Bolette Sandford Pedersen, Gunta Nešpore and Inguna Skadiņa. NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 11 (2011), iii-vii. © 2011 The editors and contributors. Published by Northern European Association for Language Technology (NEALT) http://omilia.uio.no/nealt . Electronically published at Tartu University Library (Estonia) http://hdl.handle.net/10062/16955

Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference Formal Approaches to South Slavic and Balkan languages

Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference Formal Approaches to South Slavic and Balkan Languages publishes 22 papers that were presented at the conference organised in Dubrovnik, Croatia, 25-28 Septembre 2008

The situated common-sense knowledge in FunGramKB

It has been widely demonstrated that expectation-based schemata, along the lines of Lakoff's propositional Idealized Cognitive Models, play a crucial role in text comprehension. Discourse inferences are grounded on the shared generalized knowledge which is activated from the situational model underlying the text surface dimension. From a cognitive-plausible and linguistic-aware approach to knowledge representation, FunGramKB stands out for being a dynamic repository of lexical, constructional and conceptual knowledge which contributes to simulate human-level reasoning. The objective of this paper is to present a script model as a carrier of the situated common-sense knowledge required to help knowledge engineers construct more "intelligent" natural language processing systems.Periñán Pascual, JC. (2012). The situated common-sense knowledge in FunGramKB. Review of Cognitive Linguistics. 10(1):184-214. doi:10.1075/rcl.10.1.06perS18421410

Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference Formal Approaches to South Slavic and Balkan languages

Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference Formal Approaches to South Slavic and Balkan Languages publishes 17 papers that were presented at the conference organised in Dubrovnik, Croatia, 4-6 Octobre 2010

Proceedings

Proceedings of the Ninth International Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories. Editors: Markus Dickinson, Kaili Müürisep and Marco Passarotti. NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 9 (2010), 268 pages. © 2010 The editors and contributors. Published by Northern European Association for Language Technology (NEALT) http://omilia.uio.no/nealt . Electronically published at Tartu University Library (Estonia) http://hdl.handle.net/10062/15891

Developing a knowledge base for preposition sense disambiguation: A view from Role and Reference Grammar and FunGramKB

Prepositions represent a grammatical category of frequent use in many European languages. The combination of their semantics with other lexical categories usually makes them difficult to be computationally tractable. As far as natural language processing is concerned, some studies have contributed to make progress on the usage of prepositions. However, there still exists a need to develop a model that allows tackling the problems which result from the disambiguation of prepositional semantics. The goal of this paper is to describe a lexico-conceptual model which can store the knowledge required to disambiguate predicate prepositions, as well as how this model can be exploited by a parser to extract the semantic representation of a text. The theoretical foundation of this approach, which is grounded on the premises of Role and Reference Grammar and FunGramKB, is illustrated with temporal adjuncts expressed by prepositional phrases in English.Financial support for this research has been provided by the DGI, Spanish Ministry of Education and Science, grant FFI2011-29798-C02-01. Moreover, much of this work has resulted from the first author's ongoing PhD thesis "La desambiguacion semantica de los sintagmas prepositivos como adjuntos perifericos en el marco de la Gramatica del Papel y la Referencia: un enfoque desde la linguistica computacional y la ingenieria del conocimiento", to be presented in Universidad Nacional de Educacion a Distancia (UNED).Hernández-Pastor, D.; Periñán Pascual, JC. (2016). Developing a knowledge base for preposition sense disambiguation: A view from Role and Reference Grammar and FunGramKB. Onomázein : Revista de Lingüística, Filología y Traducción. 33:251-288. https://doi.org/10.7764/onomazein.33.16S2512883

Semantic packaging in verb-based compounds in English and Bulgarian

Semantic packaging in verb­ based compounds in English and BulgarianThe article contrasts the word­ formation types of (para)synthetic compound nouns and compound verbs in two genetically distantly related but typologically distinct languages Bulgarian and English. While the nature of synthetic compound nouns in both languages is comparable, compound verbs show greater contrasts in terms of types, restrictions and preferences for intra­ compound relations and semantic diversity. An explanation is sought in terms of the influence of word­ relevant syntactic properties on word­ formation phenomena in the two languages. An additional powerful factor is the ubiquity of conversion or syntactic promiscuity in English. A hypothesis is formulated that in Bulgarian the iconicity of word­ formation processes and products associated with the biuniqueness of the sign as understood by Natural Morphology accounts for restrictions on the absolute reign of word­ formation paradigms in Bulgarian, where the distinction between inflectional morphology and word­ formation is more sharply delineated. The typological character of the two languages is ultimately taken into account as a factor which determines the preferences for compounds in English and the prevalence of affixal derivation in Bulgarian. Kompresja semantyczna w złożeniach czasownikowych w językach bułgarskim i angielskimAutorzy artykułu dokonali porównania mechanizmów słowotwórczych wykorzystywanych przy derywacji (para)syntetycznych złożeń rzeczownikowych oraz czasownikowych w językach bułgarskim i angielskim. Badane języki wykazują dalekie pokrewieństwo genetyczne, lecz z typologicznego punktu widzenia są one od siebie różne. W odróżnieniu od mechanizmów tworzenia syntetycznych złożeń rzeczownikowych, które w obu językach są podobne, złożenia czasownikowe różnią się, jeżeli chodzi o ich typy, ograniczenia użycia oraz preferencje odnośnie relacji zawartych w określonych złożeniach, jak również różnorodność semantyczną. Omawiane zjawiska są prawdopodobnie warunkowane tym, jak cechy składniowe danego języka wpływają na jego mechanizmy słowotwórcze. Kolejnym istotnym czynnikiem, kształtującym naturę tych mechanizmów w języku angielskim, jest konwersja semantyczna. W języku bułgarskim podział na morfemy słowotwórcze i fleksyjne jest dużo bardziej wyrazisty niż w języku angielskim. Autorzy stawiają hipotezę, że przyczyny tego zjawiska należy upatrywać w dwóch czynnikach: ikoniczności bułgarskich procesów słowotwórczych oraz bijekcji znaku (w rozumieniu morfologii naturalnej). W ostatecznym rozrachunku wydaje się, że to cechy typologiczne wpływają na to, że język angielski wykazuje wyraźną skłonność do tworzenia złożeń wyrazowych, zaś w języku bułgarskim dominuje zjawisko afiksacji derywacyjnej