Gerlof Bouma

Partial Word Order Freezing in Dutch

Dutch allows for variation as to whether the first position in the sentence is occupied by the subject or by some other constituent, such as the direct object. In particular situations, however, this commonly observed variation in word order is ‘frozen’ and only the subject appears in first position. We hypothesize that this partial freezing of word order in Dutch can be explained from the dependence of the speaker’s choice of word order on the hearer’s interpretation of this word order. A formal model of this interaction between the speaker’s perspective and the hearer’s perspective is presented in terms of bidirectional Optimality Theory. Empirical predictions of this model regarding the interaction between word order and definiteness are confirmed by a quantitative corpus study.

The PROIEL treebank family: a standard for early attestations of Indo-European languages

This article describes a family of dependency treebanks of early attestations of Indo-European languages originating in the parallel treebank built by the members of the project pragmatic resources in old Indo-European languages. The treebanks all share a set of open-source software tools, including a web annotation interface, and a set of annotation schemes and guidelines developed especially for the project languages. The treebanks use an enriched dependency grammar scheme complemented by detailed morphological tags, which have proved sufficient to give detailed descriptions of these richly inflected languages, and which have been easy to adapt to new languages. We describe the tools and annotation schemes and discuss some challenges posed by the various languages that have been annotated. We also discuss problems with tokenisation, sentence division and lemmatisation, commonly encountered in ancient and mediaeval texts, and challenges associated with low levels of standardisation and ongoing morphological and syntactic change.

Old Swedish Part-of-Speech Tagging between Variation and External Knowledge

We present results on part-of-speech and morphological tagging for Old Swedish (1225–1526). In a set of experiments we look at the difference between withincorpus and across-corpus accuracy, and explore ways of mitigating the effects of variation and data sparseness by adding different types of dictionary information. Combining several methods, together with a simple approach to handle spelling variation, we achieve a major boost in tagger performance on a modest test collection.

Real-Time Persistent Queues and Deques with Logic Variables (Declarative Pearl)

We present a Prolog implementation of real-time persistent queues and double-ended queues. Our implementation is inspired by Okasaki’s lazy-functional approach, but relies only on standard Prolog, comprising of the pure subset plus if-then-else constructs to efficiently implement guards and meta-calls for convenience. The resulting data structure is a nice demonstration of the fact that the use of logic variables to hold the outcome of an unfinished computation can sometimes give the same kind of elegant and compact solutions as lazy evaluation.