HG7021: Computational Grammars

Instructor Francis Bond. 2020, 2014, 2012.

HSSK MR4 Thursday 13:00-17:00

In this course we implement a computational grammar of a language (one each). You must have a laptop, preferably running Linux, or install a virtual machine running linux (I am most familiar with Ubuntu).

Course Outline

Textbooks and Tools

• Copestake, Ann. (2002) Implementing Typed Feature Structures, CLSI Publications
• Sag, Wasow and Bender (2003) Syntactic Theory: A Formal Introduction 2nd ed. CSLI Publications (ebook)
• Deep Linguistic Processing with HPSG Initiative (DELPH-IN) Wiki This is a wiki, you are encouraged to extend it.
  • Grammar Engineering FAQ
  • Grammar Engineering Glossary
  • LinGO Grammar Matrix Customization System Documentation
• HG4041: Theories of Grammar (HPSG)
• Language CoLLAGE: A collection of Matrix-derived grammars from Ling 567

Tools

• LKB
  • List of keyboard shortcuts for LKB interaction in emacs.
• ACE
• PyDelphin
• the Matrix
• ltdb (Linguistic Type Database)
• git

The Grammar Engineering Cycle

1. Create/improve/degrade! a grammar
   • Add sentences to test the change
     to a functional test suite (or the inline documentation)
   • Check they parse ok (or fail to parse for negative sentences)
   • Document the changes (in grammar and paper/thesis/assignment/book)
2. Regression test: Parse the functional test suite and a general test suite
3. If there was an improvement, commit it
   else back to step 1
4. Treebank the new profiles (maybe after several improvements)
   The update function should make this cheap
5. Identify and analyse your next phenomenon
   • Look if there are existing solutions
     in other grammars
     in the literature
6. back to step 1

Readings

• Baldwin, Timothy, Emily M. Bender, Dan Flickinger, Ara Kim and Stephan Oepen (2004). Road-testing the English Resource Grammar over the British National Corpus. Proceedings of LREC 2004, Lisbon, Portugal
• Bender, Emily M., Dan Flickinger and Stephan Oepen (2002) The Grammar Matrix: An Open-Source Starter-Kit for the Rapid Development of Cross-Linguistically Consistent Broad-Coverage Precision Grammars Carroll, John, Nelleke Oostdijk, and Richard Sutcliffe, eds. Proceedings of the Workshop on Grammar Engineering and Evaluation at the 19th International Conference on Computational Linguistics. Taipei, Taiwan. pp. 8-14.
• Emily M. Bender, Scott Drellishak, Antske Fokkens, Michael Wayne Goodman Daniel P. Mills, Laurie Poulson and Safiyyah Saleem (2010) Grammar Prototyping and Testing with the LinGO Grammar Matrix Customization System Proceedings of the ACL 2010 System Demonstrations. pp.1-6.
• Francis Bond, Stephan Oepen, Eric Nichols, Dan Flickinger, Erik Velldal and Petter Haugereid (2011) Deep Open-Source Machine Translation in Machine Translation, 25(2), pages 87--105.
• Borthen and Haugereid (2005) Representing referential properties of nominals Research on Language and Computation 3(2):221-246
• Copestake, Flickinger, Pollard and Sag (2005) Minimal Recursion Semantics
• Stephan Oepen and Dan Flickinger (1998) Towards Systematic Grammar Profiling: Test Suite Technology Ten Years after. Journal of Computer Speech and Language 12:411-435.
• Stephan Oepen, Dan Flickinger and Francis Bond (2004) Towards Holistic Grammar Engineering and Testing --- Grafting Treebank Maintenance into the Grammar Revision Cycle In Beyond Shallow Analyses --- Formalisms and Statistical Modelling for Deep Analysis (Workshop at IJCNLP-2004), Hainan Island.
• Sag, Ivan A., Timothy Baldwin, Francis Bond, Ann Copestake and Dan Flickinger (2002) Multiword Expressions: A Pain in the Neck for NLP. In Alexander Gelbuk, editor, Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing: Third International Conference: CICLing-2002 1-15, Springer-Verlag, Hiedelberg/Berlin.

Assessment

Due 2020-04-28

• 20% Testsuite (with internal documentation).
  • See the testsuite specifications for instructions.
  • Your test suite should have around 60 entries, at least half of which should be ungrammatical.
• 40% Grammar
  • the grammar should be uploaded to your github repository
  • it should be working (I should be able to load and test it)
  • it should contain a skeleton created from the testsuite
  • it should have at least one treebank
  • it should have a filter to translate to another grammar
• 40% Documentation of the Grammar of up to 20 pages following the LMS guidelines
  • Describe briefly the phenomena covered by the grammar
  • Point out where the grammar fails to model the language
  • Suggest ways the grammar should be extended

Submission Instructions

From week 5 (when we have stopped making changes via the Matrix), please upload your grammar to github.

• There are general instructions here
• Please put your testsuite under data/
data/testsuite
• Please put your skeletons under tsdb/skeletons/
tsdb/skeletons/testsuite/
tsdb/skeletons/corpus/
• Please put your write up under docs
docs/writeup.tex
• Please also commit a pdf version of your writeup
  docs/writeup.pdf

I recommend you add to .gitattributes

    *.odt binary
    *.pdf binary
  

Concrete steps (first time only)

• Create a repository
• Clone the repository
  $ git clone https://github.com/YOURNAME/GRAMMAR.git
• Add your grammar directly to the top directory
  $ git add grammar_name
• Commit your grammar
  $ git commit grammar_name "first version"
• When it is ready upload it
  $ git push grammar_name "first version"