20/02/2013
Computational grammar development: Lexical Functional Grammar and the XLE Grammar Development Platform
Prof. Mary Dalrymple (Oxford University)
Dr. I Wayan Arka (Udayana University and the Australian National University)
Thursday, 21 February 2013
10:00am - 12:00
Gedung Pascasarjana, Sudirman Campus, Udayana University
Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) is a theory of linguistic representation and organization that assumes that different aspects of linguistic structure are represented by structures which may be of very different formal types, and which are related to one another by functional correspondence, not transformations. Word order and phrasal groupings are represented by a phrase structure tree, and abstract grammatical relations like subject and object are represented by an attribute value matrix in which order does not matter. We will provide a brief introduction to the linguistic theory of LFG, followed by an extended overview and demo of the XLE Grammar Development Platform, an efficient implementation of LFG which has been used in computational implementations of grammars of a number of different languages (Indonesian, English, French, German, Japanese, Norwegian, Turkish, Hungarian, and Chinese, among others). XLE was also a critical component of work by the PARC spinoff Powerset, now a part of Microsoft, in developing a search engine relying on deep understanding of natural language. Powerset's work has now been incorporated into the search engine Bing.