Emily M. Bender

The grammar matrix: an open-source starter-kit for the rapid development of cross-linguistically consistent broad-coverage precision grammars

The grammar matrix is an open-source starter-kit for the development of broad-coverage HPSGs. By using a type hierarchy to represent cross-linguistic generalizations and providing compatibility with other open-source tools for grammar engineering, evaluation, parsing and generation, it facilitates not only quick start-up but also rapid growth towards the wide coverage necessary for robust natural language processing and the precision parses and semantic representations necessary for natural language understanding.

Efficient deep processing of Japanese

We present a broad coverage Japanese grammar written in the HPSG formalism with MRS semantics. The grammar is created for use in real world applications, such that robustness and performance issues play an important role. It is connected to a POS tagging and word segmentation tool. This grammar is being developed in a multilingual context, requiring MRS structures that are easily comparable across languages.

The Syntax of Mandarin Bă: Reconsidering the Verbal Analysis

The bă construction is central to the study of Mandarin grammar. It has received many attempts at analysis and comes up frequently as a syntactic test in discussions of other phenomena. Yet, not even its part of speech has ever been convincingly established. This paper presents the case for treating bă as a verb, considering both language-internal arguments and arguments from universal properties of parts of speech. These arguments are intended to have cross-theoretic validity.On the basis of the conclusion that bă is a verb, an analysis is developed within the framework of Lexical Functional Grammar. On this analysis, bă selects for a subject, an object, and a complement clause, and further stipulates that its object controls the TOPIC function of its complement clause.This analysis is shown to account for both the core data and the data which is problematic for other analyses. Finally, the analysis is confirmed by evidence from telicity effects in the bă construction, universal properties of verbs and prepositions, and its compatibility with the known historical development of the construction.

Grammar Customization

This paper presents the LinGO Grammar Matrix grammar customization system, a web-based service which elicits typological descriptions of languages and outputs customized grammar fragments which are ready for sustained development into broad-coverage grammars. We describe the infrastructure we have developed to support grammar customization as well as the current set of linguistic phenomena addressed, reflect on what we have learned about a methodology for this style of multilingual grammar engineering, and evaluate the typological breadth of the system by using it to create grammars for seven languages from seven different language families.

Linguistically Na"ive != Language Independent: Why NLP Needs Linguistic Typology

In this position paper, I argue that in order to create truly language-independent NLP systems, we need to incorporate linguistic knowledge. The linguistic knowledge in question is not intricate rule systems, but generalizations from linguistic typology about the range of variation in linguistic structures across languages.

Simple Negation Scope Resolution through Deep Parsing: A Semantic Solution to a Semantic Problem

In this work, we revisit Shared Task 1 from the 2012 *SEM Conference: the automated analysis of negation. Unlike the vast majority of participating systems in 2012, our approach works over explicit and formal representations of propositional semantics, i.e. derives the notion of negation scope assumed in this task from the structure of logical-form meaning representations. We relate the task-specific interpretation of (negation) scope to the concept of (quantifier and operator) scope in mainstream underspecified semantics. With reference to an explicit encoding of semantic predicate-argument structure, we can operationalize the annotation decisions made for the 2012 *SEM task, and demonstrate how a comparatively simple system for negation scope resolution can be built from an off-the-shelf deep parsing system. In a system combination setting, our approach improves over the best published results on this task to date.

Implementing the syntax of japanese numeral classifiers

While the sortal constraints associated with Japanese numeral classifiers are well-studied, less attention has been paid to the details of their syntax. We describe an analysis implemented within a broad-coverage HPSG that handles an intricate set of numeral classifier construction types and compositionally relates each to an appropriate semantic representation, using Minimal Recursion Semantics.

Parallel distributed grammar engineering for practical applications

Based on a detailed case study of parallel grammar development distributed across two sites, we review some of the requirements for regression testing in grammar engineering, summarize our approach to systematic competence and performance profiling, and discuss our experience with grammar development for a commercial application. If possible, the workshop presentation will be organized around a software demonstration.

Socially meaningful syntactic variation in sign-based grammar

In this article, I investigate the implications of socially meaningful sociolinguistic variation for competence grammar, working from the point of view of HPSG as a kind of performance-plausible sign-based grammar. Taking data from African American Vernacular English variable copula absence as a case study, I argue that syntactic constraints and social meaning are intertwined. I present an overview of the literature on social meaning, discuss what grammars are models of, and argue that in order to model socially meaningful variation, competence grammars need to be extended to include social meaning, precompiled phrases, and probabilistic or frequentistic information. I then explore different heuristics for defining the boundaries of competence grammar and discuss the commonalities between the proposed additions and the kind of linguistic knowledge which is generally assumed to comprise competence grammar.

Xigt: extensible interlinear glossed text for natural language processing

This paper presents Xigt, an extensible storage format for interlinear glossed text (IGT). We review design desiderata for such a format based on our own use cases as well as general best practices, and then explore existing representations of IGT through the lens of those desiderata. We give an overview of the data model and XML serialization of Xigt, and then describe its application to the use case of representing a large, noisy, heterogeneous set of IGT.