Maxux J. Aranzabe

A Cascaded Syntactic Analyser for Basque

This article presents a robust syntactic analyser for Basque and the different modules it contains. Each module is structured in different analysis layers for which each layer takes the information provided by the previous layer as its input; thus creating a gradually deeper syntactic analysis in cascade. This analysis is carried out using the Constraint Grammar (CG) formalism. Moreover, the article describes the standardisation process of the parsing formats using XML.

Using Finite State Technology in Natural Language Processing of Basque

This paper describes the components used in the design and implementation of NLP tools for Basque. These components are based on finite state technology and are devoted to the morphological analysis of Basque, an agglutinative pre-Indo-European language. We think that our design can be interesting for the treatment of other languages. The main components developed are a general and robust morphological analyser/generator and a spelling checker/corrector for Basque named Xuxen. The analyser is a basic tool for current and future work on NLP of Basque, such as the lemmatiser/tagger Euslem, an Intranet search engine or an assistant for verse-making.

Learning Argument/Adjunct Dictinction for Basque

This paper presents experiments performed on lexical knowledge acquisition in the form of verbal argumental information. The system obtains the data from raw corpora after the application of a partial parser and statistical filters. We used two different statistical filters to acquire the argumental information: Mutual Information, and Fishers Exact test.Due to the characteristics of agglutinative languages like Basque, the usual classification of arguments in terms of their syntactic category (such as NP or PP) is not suitable. For that reason, the arguments will be classified in 48 different kinds of case markers, which makes the system fine grained if compared to equivalent systems that have been developed for other languages.This work addresses the problem of distinguishing arguments from adjuncts, this being one of the most significant sources of noise in subcategorization frame acquisition.

Valuable language resources and applications supporting the use of Basque

We present some Language Technology applications and resources that have proven to be valuable tools to promote the use of Basque, a low density language. We also present the strategy we have followed for almost twenty years to develop those tools and derived applications as the top of an integrated environment of language resources, language tools and other applications. In our opinion, if Basque is now in a quite good position in Language Technology is because those guidelines have been followed.