Grammar Engineering

Ling 239E Topics in Computational Linguistics

Logistics

Instructors:	Ron Kaplan	Tracy Holloway King
	kaplan "at" parc.com	thking "at" parc.com
	650 812-4348	650 812-4808
Class time:	Thursday 2:15-5:05 (winter 2004)
Class location:	Meyer 143 (Mac lab)
Office hours:	Monday 4.00-4.30 (room 460-110 (linguistics dept.)) and by appointment.
	We can stay later as necessary to answer questions; send email if you need to arrive before or after this time.
	Also, you can ask questions after class on Thursday or by email or phone.

Course Description

Topics in Computational Linguistics: 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.
Provides an appropriate background for Ling239A.

Weekly topics and assignments

Week of Jan 5 :
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. (Book available at the Stanford Bookstore under the LING239E course number)
  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 Jan 12
Engineering and linguistic generalizations
Formal devices: equations, lexicons, templates, lexical rules
- Slides, notation slides
- Assignment
- Readings:
  - 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 Jan 19
Configurations and declarations
Metarulemacro
- 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 Jan 26
Ambiguity
Coordination
- Slides
- 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 Feb 2
Context-free parsing
Functional Uncertainty
Complex categories/rule parameterization (time permitting)
- Slides: Functional Uncertainty, CFP and XLE computation
- Assignment
- Readings
  - 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.
Week of Feb 9
Integration of FST technologies: tokenizers, morphological analyzers
- Slides: XLE and FST, Morphology and FST, sample English guesser
- Assignment
- Readings
Week of Feb 16
Ambiguity and robustness I: OT marks
- Slides
- Assignment
- Readings:
  - 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 Feb 23
Ambiguity and robustness II: fragments, xle performance settings, shallow markup
- Slides
- Assignment
- Readings:
  - Integration of shallow techniques: Ron Kaplan and Tracy Holloway King. 2003. Low-Level Mark-Up and Large-scale LFG Grammar Processing. In Proceedings of the LFG03 Conference. CSLI On-line Publications. pp. 238-249.
Week of Mar 1
Generation
Testing and evaluation
Stochastic disambiguation
- Slides: Generation, Testing/Evaluation, Stochastic disambiguation
- Assignment
- Readings:
  - Statistical disambiguation: Stefan Riezler, Tracy H. King, Ronald M. Kaplan, Richard Crouch, John T. Maxwell III, and Mark Johnson. 2002. Parsing the Wall Street Journal using a Lexical-Functional Grammar and discriminative estimation techniques. In Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL'02), Philadephia, PA.
  - Generation: Ronald M. Kaplan and Juergen Wedekind. 2000. LFG Generation Produces Context-free Languages. COLING.
  - 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 Mar 8
Applications and transfer
Multilingual grammar development: the ParGram project
- Slides
- Assignment: no assignment this week
- Readings:
  - Butt et al. 2002. The Parallel Grammar Project. In Proceedings of COLING-2002 Workshop on Grammar Engineering and Evaluation. pp. 1-7.
  And one of:
  - Machine translation: Anette Frank. 1999. From Parallel Grammar Development towards Machine Translation. A Project Overview. Appears in: Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit VII, Singapore.
  - Sentence condensation: Stefan Riezler, Tracy Holloway King, Richard Crouch, and Annie Zaenen. 2003. Statistical sentence condensation using ambiguity packing and stochastic disambiguation methods for Lexical-Functional Grammar. In Proceedings of the Human Language Technology Conference and the 3rd Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (HLT-NAACL'03), Edmonton, Canada. pp. 197-204.
Week of Mar 15
No class/No final

Grading

Grades will be determined based on the nine weekly assignments (each worth 10% of the grade) and class participation (worth 10% of the grade). There is no final (contrary to what the time table says).

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.

They are available from the Stanford Bookstore.
There are two copies of Butt et al. and one of Farghaly on reserve in Green Library.

Created: October 2003
Modified: March 2004