The course investigates how linguistic knowledge can be formalized on the basis of unification-based grammar formalisms such as Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG) and  Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG). These frameworks have the advantage of being well suited both for theoretical linguistic work and for computational implementations.

 

Several complex linguistic phenomena which have been analyzed in these frameworks, (i.e. clitics, wh-movement, raising and control) are considered in order to investigate the basic issues behind the formalization of linguistic knowledge as well as the most important principles underlying these formalisms. Furthermore, it will be shown how this formalized knowledge can be employed in the linguistic annotation of corpora. Special attention will be dedicated at the Corpus of Spoken Dutch and its various levels of annotation with their annotation schema’s.

 

The course constitutes an introduction to the techniques and tools that are necessary for the implementation of precise and extensible grammars which are required both in research and in industrial applications. Computational grammars can constitute an important component of text understanding systems, spell-checkers, grammar-checkers, machine translation systems and communication tools for disabled individuals. Furthermore, the sort of formalization which is at the basis of computational grammars can be employed also in the annotation of corpora with linguistic information.

 

The course will combine background lectures with the analysis and discussion of scientific articles as well as practical exercises based on the implementation of grammar fragments and/or the annotation of fragments of a corpus.

 

 

Doel:

 

* general knowledge of the way specific linguistic phenomena are formalized and implemented in unification based grammar models acquired by means of self investigation of already implemented grammar fragments;

* general knowledge of the computational properties of the formalisms and of their similarities and differences;

* application of linguistic insights to the linguistic annotation of corpora;

* relation between the various grammar models and their use in the language technology world;

* hands-on experience with the implementation of a (unification-based) grammar fragment and in the annotation of corpora;

* presentation of papers by means of visual tools;

* analysis, summarization and discussion of scientific articles;

* writing of a scientific article.