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Urdu in a parallel grammar development environment

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Abstract

In this paper, we report on the role of the Urdu grammar in the Parallel Grammar (ParGram) project (Butt, M., King, T. H., Niño, M.-E., & Segond, F. (1999). A grammar writer’s cookbook. CSLI Publications; Butt, M., Dyvik, H., King, T. H., Masuichi, H., & Rohrer, C. (2002). ‘The parallel grammar project’. In: Proceedings of COLING 2002, Workshop on grammar engineering and evaluation, pp. 1–7). The Urdu grammar was able to take advantage of standards in analyses set by the original grammars in order to speed development. However, novel constructions, such as correlatives and extensive complex predicates, resulted in expansions of the analysis feature space as well as extensions to the underlying parsing platform. These improvements are now available to all the project grammars.

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Notes

  1. The languages now also include Arabic, Chinese, Hungarian, Korean, Malagasy, Norwegian, Vietnamese, and Welsh. Some of these grammars are broad coverage grammars used in applications; some are still at initial stages of development; and some have been developed primarily to test aspects of linguistic theory.

  2. In general, these grammars have focused on edited, written texts such as newspaper text and manuals. The Urdu grammar is also geared towards such texts.

  3. These structures can be manipulated via the ordered rewrite systems (transfer component) which is part of the XLE grammar development platform to make them more specialized for a given application.

  4. ParGram does not adopt a more pervasive grammar sharing approach such as that found in (Bender and Flickinger 2005).

  5. One significant effort is the Hindi Verb Project run by Prof. Alice Davison at the University of Iowa; further information is available via their web site.

  6. Unfortunately, unlike the other grammars, there has been no full-time grammar writer on the Urdu grammar.

  7. The c-structures are less parallel in that the languages differ significantly in their word order possibilities. Japanese and Urdu are SOV languages while English is an SVO language. However, the standards for naming the nodes in the trees and the types of constituents formed in the trees, such as NPs, are similar.

  8. German and possibly French have some complex predicate constructions. The ParGram grammars for these use a less linguistically satisfying complex clause analysis. The wider range of complex predicate phenomena in Urdu make this approach infeasible.

  9. XLE implements lexical rules which can be used to delete and rename arguments, e.g., for the English passive in which the obj becomes the subj and the subj becomes the obl-ag. However, adding arguments and composing preds is not possible.

  10. The Japanese grammar (Masuichi and Ohkuma 2003) was also evaluated against the Japanese bunsetsu standard which is a type of dependency measure; see Masuichi et al. (2003) for details.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the audience of the COLING Workshop on Asian Languages in which an earlier version of this paper appeared (Butt and King 2002) and three anonymous reviewers who provided detailed comments. We would also like to thank John Maxwell for extensive discussion and implementation help over the years.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Universität Konstanz, Konstanz, 78462, Germany

    Miriam Butt

  2. Palo Alto Research Center, Palo Alto, CA, USA

    Tracy Holloway King

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  1. Miriam Butt
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Correspondence to Miriam Butt.

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Butt, M., King, T.H. Urdu in a parallel grammar development environment. Lang Resources & Evaluation 41, 191–207 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-007-9042-8

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