Grammar Engineering

Ling 187/287

Logistics

Instructors:	Ron Kaplan	Tracy Holloway King
	kaplan "at" parc.com	thking "at" parc.com
	650 812-4348	650 812-4808
Class time:	Friday 12:15-3:05 (spring 2006)
Class location:	460-334
Office hours:	by appointment
	Also, you can ask questions after class on Friday or by email or phone.

Course Description

Grammar Engineering -- Hands-on introduction to basic techniques for implementing large-scale linguistic grammars drawing on a combination of sound grammatical theory and engineering principles. Morphological and syntactic specifications within a description-based lexicalist framework. Integration of shallow and deep parsing techniques. Engineering issues in multilingual parallel grammar development. Students will incrementally extend a small grammar for English.

Prerequisite: basic knowledge of syntactic theory or Ling120.
No prior programming skills required.

Weekly topics and assignments

Final short papers (due June 12):
- Improvements to XLE (1 page)
- NL Application (3 pages)
Week of April 7 (week 1)
Introduction to grammar engineering
Introduction to LFG and XLE
- Slides and Handouts:
  Slides
  Syllabus
  XLE howto
  Basic emacs
- Assignment
- Readings:
  - Butt and King. 2003. Grammar Writing, Testing, and Evaluation. In A. Farghaly Handbook for Language Engineers. CSLI Publications.
  Background on LFG for those who need it:
  - Wescoat, Michael. 1989. Practical Instructions for Working with the Formalism of Lexical Functional Grammar. MS, Xerox PARC.
  - Other references are available on the LFG page
Week of April 14 (week 2)
Engineering and linguistic generalizations
Formal devices: equations, lexicons, templates, lexical rules
- Slides, notation slides
- Assignment
- Readings:
  - M. Dalrymple, R. Kaplan, and T.H. King. 2004. Linguistic generalizations over descriptions. LFG04 Proceedings.
  - XLE documentation: Grammar notations sections:
    1. Regular predicates for c-structure rules
    4.3 Boolean combinations
    5. Functional templates and lexical rules
    [You may wish to skim through the other sections in Grammar notations.]
Week of April 21 (week 3)
Configurations and declarations
Metarulemacro and Coordination
- Slides, demo grammar and testsuite on OBL and ADV constraints
- Assignment
- Readings
  - M. Butt, M. Forst, T.H. King, and J. Kuhn. 2003. The Feature Space in Parallel Grammar Writing. ESSLLI 2003 Workshop on Ideas and Strategies for Multilingual Grammar Development.
Week of April 28 (week 4)
Coordination and Ambiguity
- Slides, demo grammar, demo testsuite
- Assignment
- Readings:
  - Ron Kaplan and John T. Maxwell III. 1995. Constituent Coordination in Lexical-Functional Grammar. In M. Dalrymple, R. M. Kaplan, J. T. Maxwell, and A. Zaenen (eds.), Formal Issues in Lexical-Functional Grammar, Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. (Originally appeared in Proceedings of COLING-88, vol. 1 (Budapest, 1998), 303--305.) We will provide hard copies.
Week of May 5 (week 5)
Ambiguity and Robustness:
OT marks, Fragments, Performance settings, intro to shallow markup (cont May 19)
- Slides
- Assignment
- Readings
  - OT marks: Anette Frank, Tracy Holloway King, Jonas Kuhn, and John Maxwell. 1998. Optimality Theory style constraint ranking in large-scale LFG grammars. Proceedings of the LFG 98 Conference. CSLI On-line publications.
Week of May 12 (week 6)
Functional Uncertainty, Complex Categories
Testing and Evaluation
Context-Free Parsing (time permitting)
- Slides
- Assignment
- Readings:
  - Functional Uncertainty: Ronald M. Kaplan and Annie Zaenen. 1989. Long-distance dependencies, constituent structure, and functional uncertainty. (ps) In Mark Baltin and Anthony Kroch (editors), Alternative Conceptions of Phrase Structure, pp. 17-42. Chicago University Press. Reprinted in Dalrymple et al. (editors), Formal Issues in Lexical-Functional Grammar. CSLI, 1995.
  - Extra reading for those interested in documentation: Stefanie Dipper. 2003. Implenenting and Documenting Large-Scale Grammars --- German LFG Chapter 4. Ph.D. thesis IMS, University of Stuttgart. Arbeitspapiere des Instituts für Maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung (AIMS), Vol. 9(1). [If you want to read the entire dissertation, it is available on her web page.]
Week of May 19 (week 7)
Integration of FST technologies: tokenizers, morphological analyzers, shallow markup (cont. from May 5)
Generation
- Slides, sample morphology infile
- Assignment
- Readings:
  - FST and XLE: R. Kaplan, J.T. Maxwell III, T.H. King, and R. Crouch. 2004. Integrating Finite-state Technology with Deep LFG Grammars. Proceedings of the Workshop on Combining Shallow and Deep Processing for NLP. ESSLLI.
  - Generation: Ronald M. Kaplan and Juergen Wedekind. 2000. LFG Generation Produces Context-free Languages. COLING.
Week of May 26 (week 8)
Generation (cont)
Transfer/Rewrite System
Sentence Condensation
- Slides
- Assignment
- Readings:
  - D. Crouch. 2005. Packed Rewriting for Mapping Semantics to KR. Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Computational Semantics.
Week of June 2 (week 9)
Applications: Question Answering
Semantics/Knowledge Representation
Machine translation
- Slides
- Assignment
- Readings:
  - Machine translation (read one of):
    - Stefan Riezler and John T Maxwell III. 2006. Grammatical Machine Translation. Proceedings of Human Language Technology Conference - North American chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (HLT-NAACL06).
    - Anette Frank. 1999. From Parallel Grammar Development towards Machine Translation. A Project Overview. Appears in: Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit VII, Singapore.
  - Sentence Condensation: Dick Crouch, Tracy Holloway King, John Maxwell, Stefan Riezler, and Annie Zaenen. 2004. Exploiting F-Structure Input for Sentence Condensation. Proceedings of LFG04. CSLI Publications, pp167-187.
Week of June 9
No class/No final
- Final (week 9) assignment due (June 7)
- Short papers (1 page and 3 pages; June 12)

Grading

Grades will be determined based on the nine weekly assignments, two short papers, and class participation. There is no final.

Class materials

There will be assigned readings. These will be available directly from this page.
Two books that are recommended as being of interest are:

A. Farghaly Handbook for Language Engineers. CSLI Publications: An introductory text on language engineering in general, not just grammar engineering; it provides a relatively in-depth overview of what is being done in natural language processing.
M. Butt, T.H. King, M.-E. Nino, and F. Segond. 1999. A Grammar Writer's Cookbook. CSLI Publications: Discusses parallel grammar writing for deep grammars, focusing on the ParGram project; part II is devoted to grammar engineering issues.