Singlish Where Got Rules One? Constructing a Computational Grammar for Singlish

Abstract

Singlish is a variety of English spoken in Singapore. In this paper, we share some of its grammar features and how they are implemented in the construction of a computational grammar of Singlish as a branch of English grammar. New rules were created and existing ones from standard English grammar of the English Resource Grammar (ERG) were changed in this branch to cater to how Singlish works. In addition, Singlish lexicon was added into the grammar together with some new lexical types. We used Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) as the framework for this project of a creating a working computational grammar. As part of building the language resource, we also collected and formatted some data from the internet as part of a test suite for Singlish. Finally, the computational grammar was tested against a set of gold standard trees and compared with the standard English grammar to find out how well the grammar fares in analysing Singlish.

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