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Van Trijp (2013,2014) claims that Sign-Based Construction Grammar (SBCG) and Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) are fundamentally different from Fluid Construction Grammar (FCG). He claims that the former approaches are generative ones while the latter is a cognitive-functional one. I argue that it is not legitimate to draw these distinctions on the basis of what is done in FCG. Van Trijp claims that there are differences in the scientific model, the linguistic approach, formalization, the way constructions are seen, and in terms of processing. This paper discusses all these alleged differences. Van Trijp also claims that his cognitive-functional approach is superior in terms of completeness, explanatory adequacy, and theoretical parsimony. In order to facilitate a discussion and comparison, I introduce the reader to basic assumptions made in FCG and the analyses suggested by Van Trijp: I first deal with the representations that are used in FCG, talk about argument structure constructions, the combination operations fusion and merging that are used in FCG, I than discuss the analysis of nonlocal dependencies and show that the suggested FCG analysis is not explanatorily adequate since it is not descriptively adequate and that a full formalization of approaches with discontinuous constituents is not more parsimonious than existing HPSG analyses either. After the discussion of specific analyses, I then provide a detailed comparison of FCG and SBCG/HPSG and discuss questions like the competence/performance distinction, mathematical formalization vs. computer implementation, fuzziness and fluidity in grammars, and permissiveness of theories. I conclude that HPSG, SBCG, and FCG belong to the same family of theories and that all claims to the contrary are unjustified.

One of the fascinating features of English language is its robust grammar construction and syntactic structure. Learning grammar is not difficult in the present era as there are many online tools available for grammar teaching. In spite of its abundance presence and relevance, when one takes a deep dive into finding the syntactic structure used for grammar checker, it is perhaps a complex paradigm. It is hence important to study the logic of defining the grammar rules. Therefore the objective of this paper is to describe the prototype of an efficient grammar checker and to design an interface to perform grammar check. The efficiency of the proposed algorithm is improved as compared to the existing methods.

Automata theory plays a key role in computational theory as many computational problems can be solved with its help. Formal grammar is a special type of automata designed for linguistic purposes. Formal grammar generates formal languages. Rough grammar and rough languages were introduced to incorporate the imprecision of real languages in formal languages. These languages have limitations on uncertainty. The authors have considered both uncertainty and approximations to define rough fuzzy grammar and rough fuzzy languages. Under certain restrictions, their grammar reduces to formal grammar. Furthermore, the authors have proposed definition of rough fuzzy automata that accepts rough fuzzy regular language.

We describe a method of translating a Lambek grammar with one division into an equivalent context-free grammar whose size is bounded by a polynomial in the size of the original grammar. Earlier constructions by Buszkowski and Pentus lead to exponential growth of the grammar size.

We suggest that one way to approach the evolution of language is through reverse engineering: asking what components of the language faculty could have been useful in the absence of the full complement of components. We explore the possibilities offered by linear grammar, a form of language that lacks syntax and morphology altogether, and that structures its utterances through a direct mapping between semantics and phonology. A language with a linear grammar would have no syntactic categories or syntactic phrases, and therefore no syntactic recursion. It would also have no functional categories such as tense, agreement, and case inflection, and no derivational morphology. Such a language would still be capable of conveying certain semantic relations through word order-for instance by stipulating that agents should precede patients. However, many other semantic relations would have to be based on pragmatics and discourse context. We find evidence of linear grammar in a wide range of linguistic phenomena: pidgins, stages of late second language acquisition, home signs, village sign languages, language comprehension (even in fully syntactic languages), aphasia, and specific language impairment. We also find a full-blown language, Riau Indonesian, whose grammar is arguably close to a pure linear grammar. In addition, when subjects are asked to convey information through nonlinguistic gesture, their gestures make use of semantically based principles of linear ordering. Finally, some pockets of English grammar, notably compounds, can be characterized in terms of linear grammar. We conclude that linear grammar is a plausible evolutionary precursor of modern fully syntactic grammar, one that is still active in the human mind.

The Grammatical Framework (GF) not only offers state of the art grammar-based machine translation support between an increasing number of languages through its so-called Resource Grammar Library, but is also fast becoming a de facto framework for developing multilingual controlled natural languages (CNLs). For a natural language to share maximally in the opportunities that GF-based multilingual CNL support presents, it has to have a GF resource grammar. Tswana, an agglutinating Bantu language, spoken in Southern Africa as one of the eleven official languages of South Africa, does not yet have such a grammar. This article reports on the development of a so-called miniature resource grammar, a first step towards a full resource grammar for Tswana. The focus is on the modelling of the Tswana proper verb as it occurs in simple sentences. The (proper) verb is the morphologically most complex word category in Tswana, and therefore constitutes a notable contribution towards the development of a GF resource grammar for Tswana. The computational model is discussed in some detail, implemented and tested on a systematically constructed treebank.

Automated generation of system level tests for grammar based systems requires the generation of complex and highly structured inputs, which must typically satisfy some formal grammar. In our previous work, we showed that genetic programming combined with probabilities learned from corpora gives significantly better results over the baseline (random) strategy. In this work, we extend our previous work by introducing grammar annotations as an alternative to learned probabilities, to be used when finding and preparing the corpus required for learning is not affordable. Experimental results carried out on six grammar based systems of varying levels of complexity show that grammar annotations produce a higher number of valid sentences and achieve similar levels of coverage and fault detection as learned probabilities.

Software demonstrators are effective tools to show and understand scientific and engineering concepts in function, and they also allow rapid experiments. In the field of grammatical inference, there is a lack of 'ready-to-use' grammar synthesis tools, with simple interfaces showing intermediate stages of the grammar inference process, and the presented work addresses this issue by giving tools for experimentation with regular grammar and finite-state automata, to help students and researchers understand their properties, underlying concepts and applications.

We present the grammar/semantic formalism of Applicative AbstractCategorial Grammar (AACG), based on the recent techniques fromfunctional programming: applicative functors, staged languages andtyped final language embeddings. AACG is a generalization ofAbstract Categorial Grammars (ACG), retaining the benefits of ACG as agrammar formalism and making it possible and convenient to express avariety of semantic theories.We use the AACG formalism to uniformly formulate Potts' analyses ofexpressives, the dynamic-logic account of anaphora, and thecontinuation tower treatment of quantifier strength, quantifierambiguity and scope islands. Carrying out these analyses in ACGrequired compromises and the ballooning of parsing complexity, or wasnot possible at all. The AACG formalism brings modularity, which comesfrom the compositionality of applicative functors, in contrast tomonads, and the extensibility of the typed final embedding. Theseparately developed analyses of expressives and QNP are used as theyare to compute truth conditions of sentences with both these features.AACG is implemented as a `semantic calculator', which is the ordinaryHaskell interpreter. The calculator lets us interactively writegrammar derivations in a linguist-readable form and see their yields,inferred types and computed truth conditions. We easily extendfragments with more lexical items and operators, and experiment withdifferent semantic-mapping assemblies. The mechanization lets asemanticist test more and more complex examples, making empirical testsof a semantic theory more extensive, organized and systematic.

The isiZulu verb is known for its morphological complexity, which is a subject of on-going linguistics research, as well as for prospects of computational use, such as controlled natural language interfaces, machine translation, and spellcheckers. To this end, we seek to answer the question as to what the precise grammar rules for the isiZulu complex verb are (and, by extension, the Bantu verb morphology). To this end, we iteratively specify the grammar as a Context Free Grammar, and evaluate it computationally. The grammar presented in this paper covers the subject and object concords, negation, present tense, aspect, mood, and the causative, applicative, stative, and the reciprocal verbal extensions, politeness, the wh-question modifiers, and aspect doubling, ensuring their correct order as they appear in verbs. The grammar conforms to specification.

We study the parsing complexity of Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) in the formalism of Vijay-Shanker and Weir (1994). As our main result, we prove that any parsing algorithm for this formalism will take in the worst case exponential time when the size of the grammar, and not only the length of the input sentence, is included in the analysis. This sets the formalism of Vijay-Shanker and Weir (1994) apart from weakly equivalent formalisms such as Tree-Adjoining Grammar (TAG), for which parsing can be performed in time polynomial in the combined size of grammar and input sentence. Our results contribute to a refined understanding of the class of mildly context-sensitive grammars, and inform the search for new, mildly context-sensitive versions of CCG., 39 pages, 17 figures

On the Phenomenological Approach to GrammarPhenomenological foundations for grammar description of the natural language are under considerations. The picture of language world based on the factorization of communication and cognitivity is proposed. The problem of observability-unobservability in linguistics is discussed. The concept of the states of language units is formulated both with its interpretation in the formal definition of the noun's case. System analysis of the complexity in cognitive processes is considered.

Categorial grammar is well-known for its elegant analysis of coordination enabled by the flexible notion of constituency it entertains. However, to date, no systematic study exists that examines whether this analysis has any obvious empirical advantage over alternative analyses of nonconstituent coordination available in phrase structure-based theories of syntax. This paper attempts precisely such a comparison. We compare the direct constituent coordination analysis of non-canonical coordinations (right-node raising, dependent cluster coordination and Gapping) in categorial grammar with an ellipsis-based analysis of the same phenomena in the recent HPSG literature. We provide a set of empirical evidence, consisting of cases in which non-canonical coordinations interact with scopal operators of various sorts, which systematically falsifies the predictions of the latter, ‘linearization-based’ ellipsis approach to coordination. We propose an alternative analysis in a variant of categorial grammar called Hybrid Type-Logical Categorial Grammar. The proposed framework builds on both the Lambek-inspired variants of categorial grammar and a more recent line of work modelling word order via a lambda calculus for the prosodic component. The flexible syntax–semantics interface of this framework straightforwardly captures the interactions between non-canonical coordinations and scopal expressions, demonstrating the broader empirical payoff of the direct constituent coordination analysis of non-canonical coordinations pioneered by Steedman (Language 61(3):523–568, 1985; Linguist Philos 13(2):207–263, 1990) and Dowty (Categorial grammars and natural language structures, 1988) hitherto not explicitly recognized in the literature.

Tree adjoining grammars (TAGs) are mildly context sensitive formalisms used mainly in modelling natural languages. Usage and research on these psycho linguistic formalisms have been erratic in the past decade, due to its demanding construction and difficulty to parse. However, they represent promising future for formalism based NLP in multilingual scenarios. In this paper we demonstrate basic synchronous Tree adjoining grammar for English-Tamil language pair that can be used readily for machine translation. We have also developed a multithreaded chart parser that gives ambiguous deep structures and a par dependency structure known as TAG derivation. Furthermore we then focus on a model for training this TAG for each language using a large corpus of text through a map reduce frequency count model in spark and estimation of various probabilistic parameters for the grammar trees thereafter; these parameters can be used to perform statistical parsing on the trained grammar.

The two main classes of grammars are (a) hand-crafted grammars, which are developed by language experts, and (b) data-driven grammars, which are extracted from annotated corpora. This paper introduces a statistical method for mapping the elementary structures of a data-driven grammar onto the elementary structures of a hand-crafted grammar in order to combine their advantages. The idea is employed in the context of Lexicalized Tree-Adjoining Grammars (LTAG) and tested on two LTAGs of English: the hand-crafted LTAG developed in the XTAG project, and the data-driven LTAG, which is automatically extracted from the Penn Treebank and used by the MICA parser. We propose a statistical model for mapping any elementary tree sequence of the MICA grammar onto a proper elementary tree sequence of the XTAG grammar. The model has been tested on three subsets of the WSJ corpus that have average lengths of 10, 16, and 18 words, respectively. The experimental results show that full-parse trees with average F1-scores of 72.49, 64.80, and 62.30 points could be built from 94.97%, 96.01%, and 90.25% of the XTAG elementary tree sequences assigned to the subsets, respectively. Moreover, by reducing the amount of syntactic lexical ambiguity of sentences, the proposed model significantly improves the efficiency of parsing in the XTAG system.

Regularization of translational context-free grammar via equivalent transformations is a mandatory step in developing a reliable processor of a formal language defined by this grammar. In the 1970-ies, the multi-component oriented graphs with basic equivalent transformations were proposed to represent a formal grammar of ALGOL-68 in a compiler for IBM/360 compatibles. This paper describes a method of grammar regularization with the help of an algorithm of eliminating the left/right-hand side recursion of nonterminals which ultimately converts a context-free grammar into a regular one. The algorithm is based on special equivalent transformations of the grammar syntactic graph: elimination of recursions and insertion of iterations. When implemented in the system SynGT, it has demonstrated over 25% reduction of the memory size required to store the respective intermediate control tables, compared to the algorithm used in Flex/Bison parsers.

The development of precision grammars is an inherently resource-intensive process; their complexity means that changes made to one area of a grammar often introduce unexpected flow-on effects elsewhere in the grammar which may only be discovered after some time has been invested in updating numerous test suite items. In this paper, we present the browser-based gDelta tool, which aims to provide grammar engineers with more immediate feedback on the impact of changes made to a grammar by comparing parser output from two different grammar versions. We describe an attribute weighting algorithm for highlighting components of the grammar that have been strongly impacted by a modification to the grammar, as well as a technique for clustering test suite items whose parsability has changed, in order to locate related groups of effects. These two techniques are used to present the grammar engineer with different views on the grammar to inform them of different aspects of change in a data-driven manner.

The subject of the work is simulation of human cognitive processes. Authors propose a computational model of artificial grammar learning – the task allowing researchers to explore processing of environmental statistical regularities in humans. A number of the experiments are presented in the literature demonstrating that several cognitive systems take part in human information processing. The aim of the present work is to describe the model, consistent with the accumulated empirical data.The proposed model implements the dual-system approach in the form of formalized algorithms. It contains two independent blocks that process upcoming information independently. Authors describe the principles of the interaction of these blocks allowing us to simulate human behavior in different task conditions. The simulation results are compared with human experimental data represented in the literature and obtained by the authors.The model appeared to be in good agreement with the experimental data. Successful and unsuccessful aspects of the model are described and their possible reasons are discussed. In contrast to most of the current dual-system models, the presented model does not contain neural networks. The advantages of dual-system approaches are described, and symbolic and connectionist approaches to cognitive modeling are discussed. Dual-system models allow us to describe the dissociations between implicit and explicit components in human experience. Connectionist models are criticized for their complexity. Authors suggest that at the same explanatory power, symbolic models should be preferred rather than connectionist ones. They allow better understanding what information processing mechanisms that take place in the human mind.The results of the presented work can be applied in construction and testing of theoretical models in psychology, and in the development of cognitive architectures based on the human information processing mechanisms.

Nonconstituent coordination poses a particularly challenging problem for standard kinds of syntactic theories in which the notion of phrase structure (or constituency) is taken to be a primitive in some way or other. Previous approaches within such theories essentially equate nonconstituent coordination with coordination of full-fledged clauses at some level of grammatical representation. I present data from Japanese that pose problems for such approaches and argue for an alternative analysis in which the apparent nonconstituents are in fact surface constituents having full-fledged meanings, couched in a framework called Hybrid Type-Logical Categorial Grammar ( Kubota 2010 , Kubota and Levine 2012 , Kubota 2014 ).

The language described in this book is remarkable in a number of ways. ǂHȍa may have one of the world’s most complex phoneme inventories, with five basic release positions for velaric airstream con...

In this paper, I show how the development of Norsyg, an HPSG-inspired constructionalist grammar of Norwegian, benefits from the highly specific and precise implementation of NorGram, an LFG grammar for Norwegian. I focus on one aspect, NorGram’s fine-grained lexical categories. The aim of the paper is twofold: (i) to give a glimpse of the process of developing a computational grammar, and (ii) to illustrate how a constructionalist grammar benefits from the insights of NorGram, even though the grammatical models differ significantly.

We present an improved version of algorithm that can transform any context-free grammar into a supercombinator form. Such a form is composed only of lambda calculus' supercombinators that are enriched by grammar operations. The main properties of this form are non-redundancy and scalability. We show the improvements that we've made to create smaller supercombinator set than in our previous algorithm's version. We present experiments performed on Context-free grammars obtained by transformation from Groningen meaning bank corpus. Experiments confirm that our form has a theoretical maximum limit of possible supercombinators. That limit is a mathematical sequence called Catalan number. We show that in some cases we are able to reach that limit if we use large enough input data source and we limit the size of supercombinator permitted into the final set. We also describe another benefit of our algorithm, which is the identification of most reoccurring structures in the input set.

In this paper we present work in developing a computerized grammar for the Latin language.It demonstrates the principles and challenges in developing a grammar for a natural language in a modern grammar formalism.The grammar presented here provides a useful resource for natural language processing applications in different fields. It can be easily adopted for language learning and use in language technology for Cultural Heritage like translation applications or to support post-correction of document digitization.

This study investigated the effect of semantic information on artificial grammar learning (AGL). Recursive grammars of different complexity levels (regular language, mirror language, copy language) were investigated in a series of AGL experiments. In the with-semantics condition, participants acquired semantic information prior to the AGL experiment; in the without-semantics control condition, participants did not receive semantic information. It was hypothesized that semantics would generally facilitate grammar acquisition and that the learning benefit in the with-semantics conditions would increase with increasing grammar complexity. Experiment 1 showed learning effects for all grammars but no performance difference between conditions. Experiment 2 replicated the absence of a semantic benefit for all grammars even though semantic information was more prominent during grammar acquisition as compared to Experiment 1. Thus, we did not find evidence for the idea that semantics facilitates grammar acquisition, which seems to support the view of an independent syntactic processing component.

This paper extends conjunctive grammar to Probabilistic Conjunctive Grammar (PCG). This extension is motivated by the concept of probabilistic context free grammar which has many applications in the area of computational linguistics, computer science and bio-informatics. Our focus is to develop PCG for its application in linguistics and computer science. In bio-informatics stochastic conjunctive grammar has been defined to detect Pseudo knots in RNA.

Grammar question retrieval aims to find relevant grammar questions that have similar grammatical structure and usage as the input question query. Previous work on text and sentence retrieval which is mainly based on statistical analysis approach and syntactic analysis approach is not effective in finding relevant grammar questions with similar grammatical focus. In this paper, we propose a syntactic parse-key tree based approach for English grammar question retrieval which can find relevant grammar questions with similar grammatical focus effectively. In particular, we propose a syntactic parse-key tree to capture the grammatical focus of grammar questions according to the blank or answer position of the questions. Then we propose a novel method to compute the parse-key tree similarity between the parse-trees of the question query and the database questions for question retrieval. The performance results have shown that our proposed approach outperforms other classical text and sentence retrieval methods in accuracy.

This article presents a systematic exposition of how the basic ideas of Construction Grammar (CxG) (Goldberg, ) and the Parallel Architecture (PA) of grammar (Jackendoff, ) provide the framework for a proper account of morphological phenomena, in particular word formation. This framework is referred to as Construction Morphology (CxM). As to the implications of CxM for the architecture of grammar, the article provides evidence against a split between lexicon and grammar, in line with CxG. In addition, it shows that the PA approach makes it possible to be explicit about what happens on which level of the grammar, and thus to give an insightful account of interface phenomena. These interface phenomena appear to require that various types of information are accessible simultaneously, and it is argued that constructional schemas have the right format for expressing these mutual dependencies between different types of information.

Today’s environment of cooperating multiprocessor computers allows us to base modern information technologies on a large combination of simultaneously running processes, which make use of this powerful environment as much as possible. Consequently, parallel computation plays a crucially important role in computer science at present as already pointed out in the beginning of Chap. 4

We present a geometrical analysis of the principles that lay at the basis of Categorial Grammar and of the Lambek Calculus. In Abrusci (On residuation, 2014) it is shown that the basic properties known as Residuation laws can be characterized in the framework of Cyclic Multiplicative Linear Logic, a purely non-commutative fragment of Linear Logic. We present a summary of this result and, pursuing this line of investigation, we analyze a well-known set of categorial grammar laws: Monotonicity, Application, Expansion, Type-raising, Composition, Geach laws and Switching laws.

Usage-based CxG approaches share the central assumption that any grammar has to be acquired and organised through input-based abstraction and categorisation. Diasystematic Construction Grammar (DCxG) is based on the idea that these processes are not sensitive to language boundaries. Multilingual input thus results in multilingual grammars which are conceived of as constructicons containing language-specific as well as language-unspecific constructions. Within such systems, phonological structures play an important part in the identification of schematic constructions. However, the status of phonology in DCxG, as in CxG in general, yet remains unclear. This paper presents some arguments for including phonological elements systematically in the construction-based analysis of (multilingual) constructional systems.