Topics in Computational Linguistics:
Grammar Engineering

draft schedule of course and exercise topics;

background information on the LinGO Laboratory at CSLI Stanford;

obtaining the LKB package (source code and binaries for certain platforms);

instructions for course participants: using the LKB on Sweet Hall machines.

From machine translation to speech recognition and web-based search engines, a wide range of applications demand increasing accuracy and robustness from natural language processing. Meeting these demands will require better hand-built grammars of human languages combined with sophisticated statistical processing methods.

In this course we will focus on the implementation of linguistic grammars, drawing on a combination of sound grammatical theory and engineering skills, providing a hands-on introduction to the necessary techniques. A combination of lectures and in-class exercises will enable the student to investigate the implementation of constraints in morphology, syntax, and semantics, working within a unification-based lexicalist framework. While most of the course work will focus on developing small grammars for English, we will apply our jointly acquired grammar engineering expertise to at least one other language towards the end of the term.

A basic knowledge of syntactic theory — at about the level of Linguist 120 — will be assumed, but no prior programming skills are required. There will be eight hands-on exercises assigned throughout the course (see the draft schedule below) that will form the basis for joint laboratory sessions; we will try to not complete each of the exercises during the laboratory hours, but instead expect students to continue implementation work individually outside of class hours. The expected time to complete each assignment should be between two and ten hours per exercise, and students will be asked to submit their solutions to each assignment electronically.

Exercises will be graded and contribute substantially towards the final course assessment; exercise results will be complemented by a 90-minute written exam in March (exact time and date to be confirmed).

• Copestake, Ann: Implementing Typed Feature Structure Grammars. CSLI Publications, Stanford, CA (2001).
• Ann Copestake, Dan Flickinger, Ivan Sag and Carl Pollard: Minimal Recursion Semantics: An introduction. Draft Manuscript. Stanford, CA (1999).
• Ann Copestake, Alex Lascarides and Dan Flickinger: An Algebra for Semantic Construction in Constraint-based Grammars. In: Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Toulouse, France (2001).
• Stephan Oepen, Helge Dyvik, Jan Tore Lønning, Erik Velldal, Dorothee Beermann, John Carroll, Dan Flickinger, Lars Hellan, Janne Bondi Johannessen, Paul Meurer, Torbjørn Nordgård, and Victoria Rosén. .Som å kapp-ete med trollet? Towards MRS-based Norwegian–English Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Theoretical and Methodological Issues in Machine Translation, Baltimore, MD, (2004).
• Pollard, Carl and Sag, Ivan: Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL and London, UK (1994).
• Sag, Ivan, Tom Wasow, and Emily M. Bender: Syntactic Theory. A Formal Introduction (2^nd Edition). CSLI Publications, Stanford, CA (2003).
• Shieber, Stuart: An Introduction to Unification-Based Approaches to Grammar. CSLI Publications, Stanford, CA (1986).