Implementing an open source Arabic resource grammar in GF

Computational Linguistics

Angelov

Grūzītis

et al. 2020

Self Cite

Abstract 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.

Section: The Rgl Languagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Abstract Syntax as Interlingua: Scaling Up the Grammatical Framework from Controlled Languages to Robust Pipelines

Computational Linguistics

Angelov

Grūzītis

et al. 2020

Self Cite

“…The GF Resource Grammar Library implements a comprehensive fragment of fourteen natural languages: Bulgarian (Angelov, 2008), Catalan, Danish, English, Finnish (Ranta, 2008), French, German, Italian, Norwegian (bokmål), Polish, Romanian, Russian (Khegai, 2006a), Spanish, and Swedish, and the artificial language Interlingua (Union Mundial pro Interlingua, 2001). Also fragments of Arabic (Dada and Ranta, 2007), Dutch, Hindi/Urdu (Humayoun et al, 2007), Latin, Thai, and Turkish are available, and about 15 more languages are under construction. The availability of such a set of languages as an easy-to-use library has made GF into a tool for several projects in multilingual authoring and generation (Khegai et al, 2003, Burke andJohannisson, 2005), dialogue systems (Ljunglöf et al, 2006, Perera andRanta, 2007), technical translation (Khegai, 2006b, Caprotti, 2006, multilingual web pages moises-gotal, and tools for controlled languages (Ranta and Angelov, 2009).…”

Section: Grammars As Software Librariesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The GF Resource Grammar Library

2009

LiLT

Self Cite

The GF Resource Grammar Library is a set of natural language grammars implemented in GF (Grammatical Framework). These grammars are in a strong sense parallel: they are built upon a common abstract syntax, i.e. a common tree structure. Individual languages are obtained via compositional mappings from abstract syntax trees to feature structures specific to each language. The grammar defines, for each language, a complete set of morphological paradigms and a syntax fragment comparable to CLE (Core Language Engine). It is available as open-source software under the GNU LGPL License. The current coverage is fourteen languages: Bulgarian, Catalan, Danish, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Norwegian (bokmål), Polish, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish. More languages are under construction. The library can be used as a resource for language processing tasks, such as translation, multilingual generation, software localization, natural language interfaces, and spoken dialogue systems. The library may also have some language-typological interest as an experiment showing how much grammatical structure can be shared between languages. The focus of this paper is on the linguistic aspects of the library—in particular, what syntactic structures are covered and how the problems arising in different languages have been solved. We will also discuss the nature of the common abstract syntax with respect to translation equivalence.

“…Other languages may need paradigms with a few more forms, but in general, smart paradigms have proven to be an efficient and intuitive way for building lexica, either manually or as a device for enriching word lists with morphological information. The programming constructs of GF scale up to complex morphological systems such as Arabic (El Dada and Ranta 2007) and Finnish (Ranta 2008). In Finnish, as many as ten forms are sometimes needed to compute all the 26 case-number forms of a noun.…”

Section: The Gf Resource Grammar Librarymentioning

confidence: 99%

GF: A Multilingual Grammar Formalism

Language and Linguist. Compass

2009

Self Cite

GF (Grammatical Framework) is a grammar formalism designed for dealing with many languages simultaneously. A multilingual GF grammar has a language‐independent abstract syntax that deals with pure tree structures, and a set of language‐dependent concrete syntaxes that specify how the trees are expressed in different languages. Multilingual grammars formalize the idea that the same grammatical categories (such as noun phrases and verb phrases) and syntax rules (such as predication) can appear in different languages. They are also a powerful tool for natural language engineering, used for applications ranging from a translator of mathematical exercises to a dialogue system usable for talking with devices in a car. As a programming language, GF has constructs inherited from functional programming languages, an optimizing grammar compiler and code generation into several other formats. The most ambitious multilingual grammar is the GF Resource Grammar Library, which implements the main grammar rules of 12 languages. This library enables non‐linguist programmers to build linguistically correct applications. It is at the same time a linguistic experiment showing how far one can go in sharing structure between languages.