Towards an LFG parser for Polish: An exercise in parasitic grammar development

Abstract

While it is possible to build a formal grammar manually from scratch or, going to another extreme, to derive it automatically from a treebank, the development of the LFG grammar of Polish presented in this paper is different from both of these methods as it relies on extensive reuse of existing language resources for Polish. LFG grammars minimally provide two levels of representation: constituent structure (c-structure) produced by context-free phrase structure rules and functional structure (f-structure) created by functional descriptions. The c-structure was based on a DCG grammar of Polish, while the f-structure level was mainly inspired by the available HPSG analyses of Polish. The morphosyntactic information needed to create a lexicon may be taken from one of the following resources: a morphological analyser, a treebank or a corpus. Valence information from the dictionary which accompanies the DCG grammar was converted so that subcategorisation is stated in terms of grammatical functions rather than categories; additionally, missing valence frames may be extracted from the treebank. The obtained grammar is evaluated using constructed testsuites (half of which were provided by previous grammars) and the treebank.

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