Structure Grammar Research Articles

Pre-editing and Recursive-Phrase Composites for a Better English-to-Arabic Machine Translation

This research presents an approach for an English-to-Arabic Machine Translation System based on Building correct grammar and phrase structures first and then automatically deriving Translation Rules for phrase translation. For every English phrase, the grammar is first analysed and then a corresponding Arabic translation is given which would be used by the machine learning system to produce a translation rule with the help of a dictionary and the user. These same derived rules can partially be used for other phrase sequences especially in the case of a phrase consisting of a number of smaller phrases and thus implemeting the idea of recusive phrase strucutres. The approach was implemented and tested on simple cases and the results are given which indicate that this approach is successful for small to medium phrases. Our approach is an enhancement on existing phrase translation techniques because it analyses the source language grammar first, then builds a syntactic structure before proceeding with the machine learning process of learning the translation rules. Our approach is enhancement on existing phrase based translations in two directions: the grammar editing before the translation rules and the derived translation rules can be complete for complete phrases or are rules for translatioing smaller phrases which are subsets or larger phrases. The approach has improved the spped and correctness of phrase translations.

On the Generative Powers of Some Extensions of Minimal Linear Grammars

This paper concerns the Geffert normal forms for phrase structure grammars. We first generalize them to have a new formulation of minimal linear grammars with cancellation productions, called “cancel minimal linear grammars”. Then the generative powers of some classes of those grammars are investigated. It is shown that the class of languages generated by grammars with a unique {AB}-cancellation production properly includes the class of linear languages, while it is included in the class of context-free languages. Furthermore, the corresponding class of languages generated by grammars with a unique {AA}-cancellation production is shown to be a proper subclass of linear languages.

Exploring Task Effects: Focus on Form in Dictogloss and Grammar-discovery Tasks

The need to address the teaching of grammar is well established but there is little consensus concerning how learners' attention to form should be directed. For these reasons, recent research has been aimed at considering pedagogical ways to integrate instruction on problematic grammar forms within a communicative framework. The dictogloss and grammar-discovery tasks are the kind of task that aims to focus learners' attention quite explicitly on the form of the grammar structure while stimulating meaningful L2 communication and creating a purposeful context for language use. This exploratory study examines the extent to which learners learn a new grammatical rule through the two tasks. In addition to the relative effectiveness of the two tasks, the features of the dyadic discussion in the two tasks are analyzed and discussed in terms of learning outcomes.

Six Games for the German Language Classroom: Maximizing Student Communication through Simultaneous Play

The six games described in this article can be used with students from the first year of high school or first semester of college German through the fourth year of high school or fourth semester of col lege German and beyond. Unlike other games in which students must wait their turn to practice their language skills, these games engage the entire class simultaneously in speaking and listening activities. Because the whole class interacts in simultaneous activities, the instructor may not be able to control grammar and vocabulary accuracy during the game. However, the instructor can easily address gram mar and vocabulary issues before and after the game. Before playing, the instructor should intro duce students to the grammar structures and vo cabulary that they will use during the game. The in structor should also have students practice these structures orally in a controlled 'teacher-centered' environment and provide several opportunities to practice them in written and/or oral homework as signments. When the instructor is confident that students can use the grammar and vocabulary with accuracy, a game can serve as a fun wrap-up activ ity in which they practice language skills with each other. After the game has ended, the instructor can address any problems with accuracy at this point by employing a control phase to ask individual stu dents game related questions. All six games have been classroom tested. I de veloped game #2 Hast du meinen Hut? in 1989, and have used it nearly every semester in every German course from the first year through the fourth. I have yet to experience a class that did not enjoy this game. I developed the other five games roughly between the years 1994 and 2000. I have used game #1 near the end of the first-semester course, in secondand third-semester courses, and in the third-year conversation course. Each time students play this game, it is apparent from the lively classroom atmosphere that they are enjoying it. Even very shy students eagerly participate in this game. Game #3 is the only game I have not used on a regular basis, mainly because it involves a fairly high level of loud and rambunctious play. Students with competitive, aggressive and/or out going personalities play this game with great enthu siasm. Those with shy, quiet, and/or less competi tive personalities may find the game intimidating. I have used game #4 nearly every semester in the secondand third-semester course. I have also used it in the third-year conversation course and during German Club events. Most students enjoy this game, especially if they like to play cards. A few students, especially those who dislike card games, may not be particularly enthusiastic about playing, however, they do participate. Although the game may not be universally appealing, I still use it on a regular basis because most students like it and find it very useful for practicing dative pronouns. I have yet to teach a class that did not enjoy game #5. The level of intent, involvement, and cooperation stu dents exercise as they play this game is very satisfy ing for the instructor to observe. I have used game #5 regularly in the third-semester course and in the third-year conversation course. All of my students have played game #6 enthusiastically. I have used it occasionally in the third-semester course and reg ularly in the third-year conversation course.

Argumento, sintagma e saturador no escopo da HPSG

This work presents the formalization of argument as interfacial feature structure between phonology, syntax and semantics. It also shows that argument, phrase and saturator are distinct entities, although they may be related to each other. Such a distinction is based on the observation that an argument, differently from a phrase and a saturator, is an entity that is inherent to the meaning of the nucleus it is part of. The theoretical framework used is the Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), a model of grammar which is strongly lexicalist, surface oriented and based on the notion of Saussurean sign. Key words: argument, phrase, saturator, HPSG.

Improving Communication in E-democracy Using Natural Language Processing

E-democracy, the design and development of new techniques for improving communication between public administration and citizens, is a major application field for natural language processing and language engineering. Helping citizens access information in a friendly, intuitive way is the primary objective of a global e-democracy framework. The E-democracy European Network project (EDEN) aimed at discovering whether a particular NLP (natural language processing) approach could further e-democracy by increasing citizens' participation in the decision-making process. The goal was twofold: to test whether e-democracy requirements could be meet using advanced linguistic technology and to test whether augmented phrase structure grammars (APSGs) were robust and well-assessed enough to use in a real-world environment. Also, the aim is to develop two toolsets to improve communication between PAs and citizens in the context of urban planning: a set of NLP-based tools to simplify access to information and knowledge and a set of forum and polling devices

The Emergence of Second Language Syntax: A Case Study of the Acquisition of Relative Clauses

One of the great puzzles of language acquisition has been described as poverty of the stimulus: how are complex aspects of language acquired when they appear to be rare or even non-occurring in the input that a learner receives and comprehends? This article presents an emergentist solution to one aspect of this puzzle (involving relative clauses) by examining the longitudinal development of meaningful discourse produced by Ana, a 12-year-old Spanish learner of English. Relative clause constructions are considered in terms of learnable, non-abstract linguistic analyses (lexicalist signs and constructions; dependencies), informed by emergentist syntax (O'Grady 2005), analyses within Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (Sag 1997), and a comprehensive corpus grammar (Biber et al. 1999). The data show that complex aspects of language gradually emerged from item-based and compositional learning processes that interacted with the learner's environment, including input frequency and the functional purposes for which language is used. Item-based, sign-based, and compositional analyses of constructions are valuable for syllabus design (for synthetic syllabi) and for the evaluation of language proficiency (i.e. testing and measurement).

A linear approach to negative prominence

Languages often require negation to be realized in a prominent position. A well known example is Italian, which seems to require a pre-verbal realization of negation. Some other languages require negation to be in a prominent position but do not require it to be pre-verbal. An example is Swedish. Working within Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG), Sells (2000) proposes that Swedish requires a negative element which is not inside VP and that Italian has the same constraint. Similar facts are found in the VSO language Welsh. However, Sells’s approach cannot be applied to Welsh. Borsley and Jones (2005) develop a selectional approach to Welsh, in which certain verbs require a negative complement. This works well for Welsh but cannot be applied to Swedish or Italian. A similar approach to all three languages is possible within the linearization-based version of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) developed by Kathol (2000). It seems, then, that a linear approach is preferable to both a structural and a selectional approach.

What language says about the psychology of events

Despite the variety of verb meanings, linguistic research on their syntax and semantics has shown that they can be categorized into a finite and surprisingly small number of event types. More recently, research in the psycholinguistics of language acquisition and processing has emphasized the relevance of event type. The wider implication of these findings is that the conceptual fluidity of verbal concepts is confined by the fundamental structures of mental grammar, shedding light on this important interface between cognition and syntactic organization.

Long-range correlations in Korean literary corpora

Abstract Recently, Montemurro et al. showed that there would be a long-range correlation in Shakespeare’s 36 plays written in English. However it is not clear that similar result can be found in other language which has very different grammar structure from English. So we examine whether there exists a long-range correlation in Shakespeare’s plays translated into Korean which would have very different syntactic rules from English. Additionally, we perform the same experiment for 12 novels written by four Korean popular writers in order to see the difference due to the styles of the writers. As a result, we find Hurst’s exponents of 0.632 ± 0.03 in Shakespeare’s plays translated in Korean. Also we find the similar values of Hurst’s exponent even to the novels of the Korean popular writers. It implies that regardless of languages, there exists a long-range correlation in literary corpora.

Rapid development of spoken language understanding grammars

To facilitate the development of spoken dialog systems and speech enabled applications, we introduce SGStudio (Semantic Grammar Studio), a grammar authoring tool that enables regular software developers with little speech/linguistic background to rapidly create quality semantic grammars for automatic speech recognition (ASR) and spoken language understanding (SLU). We focus on the underlying technology of SGStudio, including knowledge assisted example-based grammar learning, grammar controls and configurable grammar structures. While the focus of SGStudio is to increase productivity, experimental results show that it also improves the quality of the grammars being developed.

Records and Record Types in Semantic Theory

This paper explores possibilities for formulating linguistic semantics in terms of records and record types of the kind used in recent developments of Martin-Lof type theory. We will suggest that this gives us tools to develop a single theory which includes aspects of Montague semantics, Discourse Representation Theory, situation semantics and Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. We will also argue that formulating these theories in terms of record types may provide us not only with a unified approach but also with certain improvements over the individual theories.

Broad-Coverage Parsing with Neural Networks

Subsymbolic systems have been successfully used to model several aspects of human language processing. Such parsers are appealing because they allow revising the interpretation as words are incrementally processed. Yet, it has been very hard to scale them up to realistic language due to training time, limited memory, and the difficulty of representing linguistic structure. In this study, we show that it is possible to keep track of long-distance dependencies and to parse into deeper structures than before based on two techniques: a localist encoding of the input sequence and a dynamic unrolling of the network according to the parse tree. With these techniques, the system can nonmonotonically parse a corpus of realistic sentences into parse trees labelled with grammatical tags from a broad-coverage Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar of English.

On the nature of Welsh VSO clauses

Welsh is a VSO language, in which the verb precedes the subject in finite clauses. It is widely assumed that such clauses have a basic SVO structure. This idea is not limited to Principles and Parameters/Minimalist work, but is also found in Lexical-Functional Grammar and it could also be incorporated into Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. Other things being equal, an analysis which involves an SVO structure is more complex than one that does not. Thus, the burden of proof is on advocates of an SVO structure. Arguments for such an analysis have been advanced or might be advanced on the basis VP-like constituents, anaphora, coordination and ellipsis. A close inspection of the arguments suggests that none is very compelling. Moreover, some SVO analyses face problems with agreement, negation or mutation. It seems, then, that an analysis which does not involve an SVO structure is preferable.

A Table Look-Up Parser in Online ILTS Applications

A simple table look-up parser (TLUP) has been developed for parsing and consequently diagnosing syntactic errors in semi-free formatted learners' input sentences of an intelligent language tutoring system (ILTS). The TLUP finds a parse tree for a correct version of an input sentence, diagnoses syntactic errors of the learner by tracing and regarding the deviations of the input from the identified correct sentences as errors of the learner. The TLUP can now display the parse tree as well as diagnosed errors at leaves' level. This simple super-rule based TLUP turns out to be a powerful pedagogic tool coaching L2 (second language) learners on the grammar structures in L2, saving the computing time and running space requirements, improving the parsing accuracy and allowing the real time online running environments to be applicable. The TLUP is effective as long as the input does not deviate too much from anticipated embedded patterns of model answers with committed errors remaining within the framework of anticipation for the level of the ITLS designed. We establish the validity of a TLUP by an (n, c) lot acceptance – sampling plan.

On the descriptional complexity of some rewriting mechanisms regulated by context conditions

We improve the upper bounds of certain descriptional complexity measures of two types of rewriting mechanisms regulated by context conditions. We prove that scattered context grammars having two context sensing productions and five nonterminals are sufficient to generate all recursively enumerable languages and we also show that the same power can be reached by simple semi-conditional grammars having 10 conditional productions with conditions of the length two or eight conditional productions with conditions of length three. The results are based on the common idea of using the so called Geffert normal forms for phrase structure grammars.

Consciousness-raising tasks: a learner perspective

This paper reports on a study that was carried out to determine learners’ attitudes to learning grammar through the use of two types of consciousnessraising tasks. A deductive task provided explicit explanations of a grammar structure, while an inductive task required learners to discover the grammar rules for themselves. The study investigated learners’ preferences relating to deductive and inductive tasks, and aimed to provide a learner perspective of the e=ectiveness of such tasks. The results indicated that learners viewed both task types to be useful, and there was no obvious preference for one task type over the other.

On the Complexity of RSRL

In this paper we present a computability and a complexity result on Relational Speciate Reentrant Logic (RSRL). RSRL is a description logic designed to formalise the linguistic framework and theory Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. We show here that given an RSRL-formula and a finite RSRL-interpretation it is in general not decidable if the formula is true in the given interpretation by reduction to Post Correspondence Problems. For so-called chainless RSRL, a semantically weaker version in which the expressive power of RSRL is significantly reduced, we show that if a class of finite structures is definable in chainless RSRL it is decidable by a Turing machine polynomially time bounded in the size of the input structures.

Connectionism, HPSG signs and SLA representations: specifying principles of mapping between form and function

A current limitation of the connectionist approach to second language acquisition (SLA) research is that it does not, to my knowledge, include complex linguistic representations. This article proposes a partial solution to this limitation by motivating and illustrating specific analyses that utilize the sign-based representations developed within Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). To motivate the proposed representations, the article applies them to an analysis of four types of mappings between form and function: one-to-one, primed redundancy, nonprimed redundancy and polyfunctional. The paper summarizes representative SLA data that indicate how these mappings may appear in second language (L2) production. Key properties of HPSG analyses are discussed, indicating how they are consistent with connectionist assumptions. Sign-based representations of the four types of mappings are then provided, including several modifications to HPSG formalisms. The article concludes with a discussion of future directions.

Any questions left? Review of Ginzburg & Sag's Interrogative investigations

For better or worse, linguistics is rife with frameworks, each with its own ethos. Two important aspects of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar's are: (1) the search for an explicit and exhaustive account of the intricate syntactic and semantic facts that constitute one's grammar and (2) the hypothesis that general/universal and specific aspects of one's grammar are not qualitatively distinct. This book stands as a superb example of this ethos. It illustrates the fecundity of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (henceforth, HPSG) as a framework and advances our knowledge of the syntax and semantics of interrogatives. It is the most explicit description of the semantics and syntax of any area of English syntax of which this reviewer is aware. It thus sets up a healthy empirical benchmark for other theories of interrogatives. The sixty pages of appendices that detail the grammar discussed in the book and its almost complete implementation in the current version of the English Resource Grammar attest to this empirical bent. Any future theory will have to match it in accuracy before any metatheoretical issues (e.g. simplicity or explanatory adequacy) can be meaningfully discussed. Its precision and comprehensiveness will also, hopefully, lead to descriptions of unbounded dependencies and clause-types in other languages that are orders of magnitude more detailed than those currently available. Ginzburg & Sag's (G&S's) book also illustrates how possibly universal principles (such as the requirement that head-daughters and mothers of a local tree share information) and construction-specific requirements (such as the fact that the scope of