Lionel Clément

Building a Treebank for French

We present a treebank project for French. We have annotated a newspaper corpus of 1 Million words with part of speech, inflection, compounds, lemmas and constituency. We describe the tagging and parsing phases of the project, and for each, the automatic tools, the guidelines and the validation process. We then present some uses of the corpus as well as some directions for future work.

A logical approach to grammar description

In the tradition of Model Theoretic Syntax, we propose a logical approach to the description of grammars. We combine in one formalism several tools that are used throughout computer science for their power of abstraction: logic and lambda calculus. We propose then a high-level formalism for describing mildly context sensitive grammars and their semantic interpretation. As we rely on the correspondence between logic and finite state automata, our method combines con-ciseness with effectivity. We illustrate our approach with a simple linguistic model of several interleaved linguistic phenomena involving extraction. The level of abstraction provided by logic and lambda calculus allows us not only to use this linguistic model for several languages, namely English, German, and Dutch, but also for semantic interpretation.