A CNL for Contract-Oriented Diagrams

We present a first step towards a framework for defining and manipulating normative documents or contracts described as Contract-Oriented (C-O) Diagrams. These diagrams provide a visual representation for such texts, giving the possibility to express a signatory's obligations, permissions and prohibitions, with or without timing constraints, as well as the penalties resulting from the non-fulfilment of a contract. This work presents a CNL for verbalising C-O Diagrams, a web-based tool allowing editing in this CNL, and another for visualising and manipulating the diagrams interactively. We then show how these proof-of-concept tools can be used by applying them to a small example

Programming Language Techniques for Natural Language Applications

It is easy to imagine machines that can communicate in natural language. Constructing such machines is more difficult. The aim of this thesis is to demonstrate how declarative grammar formalisms that distinguish between abstract and concrete syntax make it easier to develop natural language applications. We describe how the type-theorectical grammar formalism Grammatical Framework (GF) can be used as a high-level language for natural language applications. By taking advantage of techniques from the field of programming language implementation, we can use GF grammars to perform portable and efficient parsing and linearization, generate speech recognition language models, implement multimodal fusion and fission, generate support code for abstract syntax transformations, generate dialogue managers, and implement speech translators and web-based syntax-aware editors. By generating application components from a declarative grammar, we can reduce duplicated work, ensure consistency, make it easier to build multilingual systems, improve linguistic quality, enable re-use across system domains, and make systems more portable

Editing Syntax Trees on the Surface

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), 138-145. © 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

RIGOTRIO at SemEval-2017 Task 9: Combining Machine Learning and Grammar Engineering for AMR Parsing and Generation

By addressing both text-to-AMR parsing and AMR-to-text generation, SemEval-2017 Task 9 established AMR as a powerful semantic interlingua. We strengthen the interlingual aspect of AMR by applying the multilingual Grammatical Framework (GF) for AMR-to-text generation. Our current rule-based GF approach completely covered only 12.3% of the test AMRs, therefore we combined it with state-of-the-art JAMR Generator to see if the combination increases or decreases the overall performance. The combined system achieved the automatic BLEU score of 18.82 and the human Trueskill score of 107.2, to be compared to the plain JAMR Generator results. As for AMR parsing, we added NER extensions to our SemEval-2016 general-domain AMR parser to handle the biomedical genre, rich in organic compound names, achieving Smatch F1=54.0%

TectoMT – a deep-­linguistic core of the combined Chimera MT system

Chimera is a machine translation system that combines the TectoMT deep-linguistic core with phrase-based MT system Moses. For English–Czech pair it also uses the Depfix post-correction system. All the components run on Unix/Linux platform and are open source (available from Perl repository CPAN and the LINDAT/CLARIN repository). The main website is https://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/tectomt. The development is currently supported by the QTLeap 7th FP project (http://qtleap.eu)

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

A hybrid system for patent translation

This work presents a HMT system for patent translation. The system exploits the high coverage of SMT and the high precision of an RBMT system based on GF to deal with specific issues of the language. The translator is specifically developed to translate patents and it is evaluated in the English-French language pair. Although the number of issues tackled by the grammar are not extremely numerous yet, both manual and automatic evaluations consistently show their preference for the hybrid system in front of the two individual translators.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version