Structures grammaticales dans le français mathématique : 1

A system of grammatical rules is presented to analyse a fragment of French that permits the expression of mathematical theorems and proofs. To this end, a version of Montague grammar is developed, with syntactic categories relativized to a context and to domains of individuals. This system can be interpreted in the constructive type theory of Martin-Löf. It is first applied to French without mathematical symbols, paying special attention to selectional restrictions and to dependencies on context. The fragment includes verbs and adjectives, plurals, relative clauses, and coordinated phrases of different categories. Second, the grammar is extended to mathematical symbolism and its embedding in French text. The fragment comprises arithmetical formulae, decimal notation, parenthesis conventions, explicit variables, statements of theorems, and textual structures of proofs. Finally, some applications of the grammar are studied, based on a declarative implementation in the proof editor ALF.Un système de règles grammaticales est présenté pour analyser un fragment du français permettant l'expression de théorèmes et de preuves mathématiques. Pour cet objectif, on développe une version de la grammaire de Montague, avec des catégories syntaxiques relatives au contexte et aux domaines d'individus. Ce système peut être interprété dans la théorie constructive des types de Martin-Löf. Il est appliqué, d'abord, au français sans symboles mathématiques, avec une attention spéciale aux restrictions de sélection et aux dépendances par rapport à un contexte. Le fragment comprend des verbes et des adjectifs, des formes plurielles, des propositions relatives, et des syntagmes coordonnés. Ensuite, la grammaire est étendue au symbolisme mathématique et à son usage dans le texte français. Le fragment comprend des formules arithmétiques, la notation décimale, les conventions de parenthèses, les variables explicites, des énoncés de théorèmes et des structures textuelles de preuves. On finit par étudier quelques applications de la grammaire, basées sur l'implémentation déclarative de la grammaire dans ALF, un éditeur de preuves

Computational semantics in type theory

This paper aims to show how Montague-style grammars can be completely formalized and thereby declaratively implemented by using the Grammatical Framework GF. The implementation covers the fundamental operations of Montague’s PTQ model: the construction of analysis trees, the linearization of trees into strings, and the interpretation of trees as logical formulas. Moreover, a parsing algorithm is derived from the grammar. Given that GF is a constructive type theory with dependent types, the technique extends from explain anaphoric reference. On the other hand, GF has a built-in compositionality requirement that is stronger than in PTQ and prevents us from formulating quantifying-in rules of Montague style. This leads us to alternative formulations of such rules in terms of combinators and discontinuous constituents. The PTQ fragment will moreover be presented as an example of how a GF grammar is modified by replacing English with another target language, French. The paper concludes by a discussion of the complementary rôles of logically and linguistically oriented syntax.Cet article montre une formalisation complète des grammaires à la Montague dans le cadre de GF (Grammatical Framework), une formalisation qui est en même temps une implémentation déclarative. Cette implémentation comprend toutes les opérations fondamentales du modèles PTQ de Montague : la construction des arbres d’analyse, la linéarisation des arbres en chaînes de caractères, et l’interprétation des arbres comme formules logiques. De plus, un algorithme d’analyse syntaxique est dérivé de toute grammaire représentée dans GF. Comme GF est une théorie constructive des types avec des types dépendants, la technique utilisée pour les grammaires classiques de Montague est généralisée au cas où l'isomorphisme de Curry-Howard est utilisé pour expliquer la référence anaphorique. D'autre part, GF impose une condition de compositionnalité qui est plus forte que celle du PTQ. Ceci empêche la formulation des règles dites "quantifying in" de Montague. Nous arrivons ainsi à des formulations alternatives de ces règles utilisant des combinateurs et des constituants discontinues. Le fragment PTQ est aussi présenté comme exemple de la modification d'une grammaire GF par remplacement de l'anglais par une autre langue de cible, le français. L'article conclut par une discussion sur les rôles complémentaires d'une syntaxe logique et d'une syntaxe linguistique

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 Web-Based Tool for Analysing Normative Documents in English

Our goal is to use formal methods to analyse normative documents written in English, such as privacy policies and service-level agreements. This requires the combination of a number of different elements, including information extraction from natural language, formal languages for model representation, and an interface for property specification and verification. We have worked on a collection of components for this task: a natural language extraction tool, a suitable formalism for representing such documents, an interface for building models in this formalism, and methods for answering queries asked of a given model. In this work, each of these concerns is brought together in a web-based tool, providing a single interface for analysing normative texts in English. Through the use of a running example, we describe each component and demonstrate the workflow established by our tool

An End-to-End Pipeline from Law Text to Logical Formulas

We propose a pipeline for converting natural English law texts into logical formulas via a series of structural representations. Text texts are first parsed using a formal grammar derived from light-weight annotations. An intermediate representation called assembly logic is then used for logical interpretation and supports translations to different back-end logics and visualisations. The approach, while rule-based and explainable, is also robust: it can deliver useful results from day one, but allows subsequent refinements and variations

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

Patent translation within the MOLTO project

MOLTO is an FP7 European project whose goal is to translate texts between multiple languages in real time with high quality. Patents translation is a case of study where research is focused on simultaneously obtaining a large coverage without loosing quality in the translation. This is achieved by hybridising between a grammar-based multilingual translation system, GF, and a specialised statistical machine translation system. Moreover, both individual systems by themselves already represent a step forward in the translation of patents in the biomedical domain, for which the systems have been trained.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

MT techniques in a retrieval system of semantically enriched patents

This paper focuses on how automatic translation techniques integrated in a patent retrieval system increase its capabilities and make possible extended features and functionalities. We describe 1) a novel methodology for natural language to SPARQL translation based on a grammar– ontology interoperability automation and a query grammar for the patents domain; 2) a devised strategy for statisticalbased translation of patents that allows to transfer semantic annotations to the target language; 3) a built-in knowledge representation infrastructure that uses multilingual semantic annotations; and 4) an online application that offers a multilingual search interface over structural knowledge databases (domain ontologies) and multilingual documents (biomedical patents) that have been automatically translated.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version