Free word order languages

There is a need to develop a suitable c o m p u t a t i o n a l g r a m m a r formalism for free word order languages for two reasons: First, a suitably designed formalism is likely to be more efficient. Second, such a formalism is also likely to be linguistically more elegant and satisfying. In this paper, we describe such a formalism, called the Paninian framework, t h a t has been successfully applied to Indian languages. This p a p e r shows t h a t the Paninian framework...

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Free-word order languages have long posed significant problems for s t a n d a r d parsing algorithms. This paper reports on an implemented parser, based on GovernmentBinding theory (GB) (Chomsky, 1981, 1982), for a particular free-word order language, Warlpiri, an aboriginal language of central Australia. The parser is explicitly designed to transparently mirror the principles of GB. The operation of this parsing system is quite different in character from that of a rule-based parsing system, ~e.g., a context-free parsing method.

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" Dept. of Computer and Information Sciences University of Pennsylvania P h i l a d e l p h i a , PA 1 9 1 0 4 (hoffman@ linc.cis.upenn.edu) INTRODUCTION In this paper, I present work in progress on an extension of Combinatory Categorial Grammars, CCGs, (Steedman 1985) to handle languages with freer word order than English, specifically Turkish. The approach I develop takes advantage of CCGs' ability to combine the syntactic as well as the semantic representations of adjacent elements in a sentence in an incremental manner. The linguistic claim behind my approach is that free word...

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This paper presents a parser of an inflectional free word order language, namely Finnish. Two-way finite automata are used to specify a functional dependency grammar and to actually parse Finnish sentences. Each automaton gives a functional description of a dependency structure within a constituent. Dynamic local control of the parser is realized by augmenting the automata with simple operations to make the automata, associated with the words of an input sentence, activate one another.

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In Sayeed and Szpakowicz (2004), we proposed a parser inspired by some aspects of the Minimalist Program. This incremental parser was designed specifically to handle discontinuous constituency phenomena for NPs in Latin. We take a look at the application of this parser to a specific kind of apparent island violation in Latin involving the extraction of constituents, including subjects, from tensed embedded clauses. We make use of ideas about the left periphery from Rizzi (1997) to modify our parser in order to handle apparently violated subject islands and similar phenomena. ...

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German word order) The framework is slightly modified to accommodate the relevant class of word order regularities. The syntactic framework presented in this paper is not hound to any particular theory of discourse processing; it enables syntax to interact with whatever formal model of pragmatics one might want to implement. A brief discussion of the framework's implication~ for computational implementation centers Upon the problem of the status of metagrammatical devices.

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This is simply a restatement of the notion of clause union or scrambling familiar from transformational analyses. Our proposal is to provide a feature-value logic with a rigorous semantics with sufficient e x p r e s s i v e power to allow the encoding of even syntactic structure within the single formalism. This means that the work of encoding syntactic structure is carried by the feature-value logic and not by formal language theoretic devices (i.e., phrase structure rules).

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We prove in this paper that unordered, or I D / L P grammars, are e.xponentially more succinct than contextfree grammars, by exhibiting a sequence (L,~) of finite languages such that the size of any CFG for L,~ must grow exponentially in n, but which can be described by polynomial-size I D / L P grammars. The results have implications for the description of free word order languages.

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To account for the semi-free word order of French, Unification Categorial Grammar is extended in two ways. First, verbal valencies are contained in a set rather than in a list. Second, type-raised NP's are described as two-sided functors. The new framework does not overgenerate i.e., it accepts all and only the sentences which are grammatical. This follows partly from the elimination of false lexical ambiguities - i.e.

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We report in this paper our work on accurately generating case markers and suffixes in English-to-Hindi SMT. Hindi is a relatively free word-order language, and makes use of a comparatively richer set of case markers and morphological suffixes for correct meaning representation. From our experience of large-scale English-Hindi MT, we are convinced that fluency and fidelity in the Hindi output get an order of magnitude facelift if accurate case markers and suffixes are produced.

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Efficiency is a prime concern in syntactic MT decoding, yet significant developments in statistical parsing with respect to asymptotic efficiency haven’t yet been explored in MT. Recently, McDonald et al. (2005b) formalized dependency parsing as a maximum spanning tree (MST) problem, which can be solved in quadratic time relative to the length of the sentence. They show that MST parsing is almost as accurate as cubic-time dependency parsing in the case of English, and that it is more accurate with free word order languages. ...

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Consistency of corpus annotation is an essential property for the many uses of annotated corpora in computational and theoretical linguistics. While some research addresses the detection of inconsistencies in positional annotation (e.g., partof-speech) and continuous structural annotation (e.g., syntactic constituency), no approach has yet been developed for automatically detecting annotation errors in discontinuous structural annotation.

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Topological Dependency Grammar (TDG) is a lexicalized dependency grammar formalism, able to model languages with a relatively free word order. In such languages, word order variation often has an important function: the realization of information structure. The paper discusses how to integrate information structure into TDG, and presents a constraint-based approach to modelling information structure and the various means to realize it, focusing on (possibly simultaneous use of) word order and tune. ...

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This paper presents results from the first statistical dependency parser for Turkish. Turkish is a free-constituent order language with complex agglutinative inflectional and derivational morphology and presents interesting challenges for statistical parsing, as in general, dependency relations are between “portions” of words – called inflectional groups. We have explored statistical models that use different representational units for parsing.

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This paper proposes a hybrid of handcrafted rules and a machine learning method for chunking Korean. In the partially free word-order languages such as Korean and Japanese, a small number of rules dominate the performance due to their well-developed postpositions and endings. Thus, the proposed method is primarily based on the rules, and then the residual errors are corrected by adopting a memory-based machine learning method.

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A recognition grammar to supply information to a text-to-speech system for the synthesis of Italian must rely heavily upon lexical information, in order to instantiate the appropriate grammatical relations. Italian is an almost free word order language which nonetheless adopts f a i r l y analysable strategies to move major constituents: some of these can strongly affect the functioning of the phonotogical component. Two basic claims w i l l be made: i. d i f f i c u l t i e s in associating grammatical functions to constituent structure can be overcome only i f...

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This paper considers statistical parsing of Czech, which differs radically from English in at least two respects: (1) it is a highly inflected language, and (2) it has relatively free word order. These differences are likely to pose new problems for techniques that have been developed on English. We describe our experience in building on the parsing model of (Collins 97). Our final results - 80% dependency accuracy - represent good progress towards the 91% accuracy of the parser on English (Wall Street Journal) text. ...

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Assamese is a morphologically rich, agglutinative and relatively free word order Indic language. Although spoken by nearly 30 million people, very little computational linguistic work has been done for this language. In this paper, we present our work on part of speech (POS) tagging for Assamese using the well-known Hidden Markov Model. Since no well-defined suitable tagset was available, we develop a tagset of 172 tags in consultation with experts in linguistics.

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For languages with (semi-) free word order (such as German), labelling grammatical functions on top of phrase-structural constituent analyses is crucial for making them interpretable. Unfortunately, most statistical classifiers consider only local information for function labelling and fail to capture important restrictions on the distribution of core argument functions such as subject, object etc., namely that there is at most one subject (etc.) per clause.

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Motivation for including relational constraints other than equality within grammatical formalisms has come from discontinuous constituency and partially free word order for natural languages as well as from the need to define combinatory operations at the most basic level for languages with a two-dimensional syntax (e.g., mathematical notation, chemical equations, and various diagramming languages). This paper presents F-PATR, a generalization of the PATR-II unification-based formalism, which incorporates relational constraints expressed as user-defined functions. ...

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