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Orthography Engineering in Grammatical Framework

Summary

In grammar engineering, orthography is usually delegated to external pre- and postprocessors: tokenizers, compound-splitting modules, and truecasing tools. The author shows that this approach works poorly for languages with compound words (German, Swedish), for agglutinative languages, and for context-dependent forms such as English a/an. An external tool has to be built separately for each language. It partly duplicates knowledge already present in the grammar, and it also has to be ported to every new platform. For this reason, several primitives have been added to Grammatical Framework (GF) that make it possible to describe spaces, capitalization, contextual variants, and missing word forms within the grammar itself. Because GF is reversible, each extension has two behaviours: generation produces canonical text, while the parser accepts deviations from the norm. To let the parser join words together, the Earley-style algorithm for PMCFG has been moved to character positions. As a result, an ambiguous segmentation of a word is stored directly in the chart, and no separate segmentation lattice is needed. The extensions have been tested in practice. The value of the work is that all linguistic knowledge is kept in a single portable formalism, and the ideas can be applied even in simple context-free grammars.

Key points

  • Three tokens are introduced for spaces. BIND joins adjacent words; for example, Swedish data + vetenskap gives datavetenskap. SOFT_BIND also joins words during generation, but the parser accepts them with a space in between as well, which is convenient for punctuation. SOFT_SPACE does the opposite: during generation it inserts a space, while the parser allows it to be omitted. BIND is used for suffixes in the Finnish, Estonian and Maltese grammars, as well as for composing multi-digit numbers.
  • Capitalization is controlled by CAPIT and ALL_CAPIT. For example, in the German compound Aktion + Plan → Aktionsplan, the second part is written in lowercase. If the parser simply skips these tokens, parsing becomes case-insensitive.
  • The pre construction selects a form depending on the following word (a/an, French la/l'). The generator postpones this choice until the whole sentence is known, while the parser, for robustness, accepts all variants.
  • nonExist marks missing cells in inflection tables. It is implemented inside the parser and is not visible through the API. A workaround using a special "word", by contrast, would show up in the suggestions of tools for controlled languages.
  • The new operations (except pre) have type Str and are exported from the Prelude module. They are used extensively in an offline mobile translator for 12 languages (Angelov et al., 2014).

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Cited by

2 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 1 of them have a page here, 1 not yet.

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.18653/v1/w15-3305

@inproceedings{angelov2015orthography,
  title = {{Orthography Engineering in Grammatical Framework}},
  author = {Angelov, Krasimir},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Grammar Engineering Across Frameworks (GEAF) 2015 Workshop},
  year = {2015},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/w15-3305},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/w15-3305}
}

References

21 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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