Israeli Science Foundation (grants 136/01, 505/11)
Abstract
Linguistic theories are now so mature that it is possible to describe
linguistic analyses using for- mal grammars. Such grammars are written
in formal languages, called grammatical formalisms, that resemble very
high level, declarative (mostly logical) programming
languages. Grammars for natural languages are thus very similar to
computer programs. However, while computer programmers can benefit
from two decades of research in software engineering, grammar
engineering is still in its infancy. The proposed research will apply
methods and techniques of programming language theory and software engineering to grammatical formalisms and grammar engineering, and will
thereby provide the necessary infrastructure for modular construction
of large grammars for natural languages. Such an infrastructure will
include a set of grammar combination operators that are useful for
grammar developers, a formal semantics that is compositional and
fully-abstract with respect to this set of combination operators and a
formal definition of grammar modules. It will make it possible to
mathematically prove the correctness of a grammar, with respect to an
independent definition; to construct provably correct parsers and
gener- ators for modular grammars; to implement several optimizations
on compiled grammars, relying on the equivalence of different
grammars; etc.
Resources
None.
Publications
Yael Sygal and Shuly Wintner.
Towards Modular Development of Typed Unification Grammars.
Computational Linguistics 37(1):29-74, March 2011.
PDF.
Yael Sygal and Shuly Wintner.
Associative Grammar Combination Operators for Tree-Based Grammars.
Journal of Logic, Language and Information, 18(3):293-316, July 2009.
PDF (The original publication is available from Springer)
Yael Sygal and Shuly Wintner.
Type Signature Modules.
In Philippe de Groote (Ed.) Proceedings of FG 2008: The 13th conference on Formal Grammar, pages 113-128, Hamburg, Germany, August 2008.
PDF.
Yael Cohen-Sygal and Shuly Wintner.
The Non-Associativity of Polarized Tree-Based Grammars.
In Gelbukh, A., editor, Proceedings of the Conference on Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing (CICLing-2007),
volume 4394 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 208-217, Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer, February 2007.
PDF, copyright Springer Verlag.
Yael Cohen-Sygal and Shuly Wintner.
Partially Specified Signatures: A Vehicle for Grammar
Modularity.
In Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on
Computational Linguistics and 44th Annual Meeting of the
Association for Computational Linguistics, pages
145-152, Sydney, Australia, July 2006.
PDF.