Developing a TT-MCTAG for German with an RCG-based parser

Developing linguistic resources, in particular grammars, is known to be a complex task in itself, because of (amongst others) redundancy and consistency issues. Furthermore some languages can reveal themselves hard to describe because of specific characteristics, e.g. the free word order in German. In this context, we present (i) a framework allowing to describe tree-based grammars, and (ii) an actual fragment of a core multicomponent tree-adjoining grammar with tree tuples (TT-MCTAG) for German developed using this framework. This framework combines a metagrammar compiler and a parser based on range concatenation grammar (RCG) to respectively check the consistency and the correction of the grammar. The German grammar being developed within this framework already deals with a wide range of scrambling and extraction phenomena

Efficient Normal-Form Parsing for Combinatory Categorial Grammar

Under categorial grammars that have powerful rules like composition, a simple n-word sentence can have exponentially many parses. Generating all parses is inefficient and obscures whatever true semantic ambiguities are in the input. This paper addresses the problem for a fairly general form of Combinatory Categorial Grammar, by means of an efficient, correct, and easy to implement normal-form parsing technique. The parser is proved to find exactly one parse in each semantic equivalence class of allowable parses; that is, spurious ambiguity (as carefully defined) is shown to be both safely and completely eliminated.Comment: 8 pages, LaTeX packaged with three .sty files, also uses cgloss4e.st

Comparing and evaluating extended Lambek calculi

Lambeks Syntactic Calculus, commonly referred to as the Lambek calculus, was innovative in many ways, notably as a precursor of linear logic. But it also showed that we could treat our grammatical framework as a logic (as opposed to a logical theory). However, though it was successful in giving at least a basic treatment of many linguistic phenomena, it was also clear that a slightly more expressive logical calculus was needed for many other cases. Therefore, many extensions and variants of the Lambek calculus have been proposed, since the eighties and up until the present day. As a result, there is now a large class of calculi, each with its own empirical successes and theoretical results, but also each with its own logical primitives. This raises the question: how do we compare and evaluate these different logical formalisms? To answer this question, I present two unifying frameworks for these extended Lambek calculi. Both are proof net calculi with graph contraction criteria. The first calculus is a very general system: you specify the structure of your sequents and it gives you the connectives and contractions which correspond to it. The calculus can be extended with structural rules, which translate directly into graph rewrite rules. The second calculus is first-order (multiplicative intuitionistic) linear logic, which turns out to have several other, independently proposed extensions of the Lambek calculus as fragments. I will illustrate the use of each calculus in building bridges between analyses proposed in different frameworks, in highlighting differences and in helping to identify problems.Comment: Empirical advances in categorial grammars, Aug 2015, Barcelona, Spain. 201

The Grail theorem prover: Type theory for syntax and semantics

As the name suggests, type-logical grammars are a grammar formalism based on logic and type theory. From the prespective of grammar design, type-logical grammars develop the syntactic and semantic aspects of linguistic phenomena hand-in-hand, letting the desired semantics of an expression inform the syntactic type and vice versa. Prototypical examples of the successful application of type-logical grammars to the syntax-semantics interface include coordination, quantifier scope and extraction.This chapter describes the Grail theorem prover, a series of tools for designing and testing grammars in various modern type-logical grammars which functions as a tool . All tools described in this chapter are freely available