A computational grammar and lexicon for Maltese

ible to the author (and thus not listed in the bibliography) are Lawrenz Cachia’s Grammatika
Ġdida tal-Malti (1994) and Edmund Sutcliffe’s A Grammar of the Maltese Language (1936). Older
historical grammars include A Short Grammar of the Maltese Language by an unknown author in
1845, Francis Vella’s Maltese Grammar for the use of the English (1831), and Michelantonio Vassalli’s
Grammatica della lingua Maltese (1827).
1.2.2 Corpora and terminologies
MLRS corpus
A monolingual corpus for Maltese has been compiled and is hosted by the Maltese Language
Resource Server (MLRS) 1 (Rosner et al. , 2006). The MLRS Corpus (Gatt & Borg, 2011) can
be described as an opportunistic text collection of nearly 130 million tokens, mostly created
from publicly available documents, but also including a limited amount of user-contributed
material. Texts for the version 2.0 BETA of the corpus were pre-processed to remove duplicate
material and long stretches of non-Maltese text. They were also processed with a simple
dictionary-based spelling correction, and part-of-speech (POS) tagged using the TnT Tagger
trained on circa 26k of manually annotated text.
Parallel corpora
There are also some parallel corpora for Maltese, which have come from the translation efforts
of the European Commission. The JRC-Acquis corpus (Ralf et al. , 2006) is a parallel corpus containing
the complete text of the European Union Law (Acquis Communautaire) in 22 languages.
Other parallel texts for Maltese are accessible through the OPUS project (Tiedemann, 2009)
— a open-access collection of translated texts from the web, automatically processed and annotated
using open-source products. OPUS contains parallel corpora for English-Maltese from:
• EMEA - PDF documents from the European Medicines Agency (11.2M tokens)
• ECB - Website and documentation from the European Central Bank (2.7M tokens)
• EUconst - A parallel corpus collected from the European Constitution (0.1M tokens)
MAMCO — Maltese Multimodal corpus
Work has also begun on a Multi-modal corpus for Maltese, beginning with video recordings of
first-encounter conversations between pairs of Maltese speakers. The setting and organisation
replicate those used in the Nordic NOMCO corpus. Corpus annotations include transcription
of the spoken data, as well as annotation of head movements and other gestures. This corpus
has allowed studies on, amongst others, lengthening as a discourse strategy (Paggio et al. ,
2013).
1 http://mlrs.research.um.edu.mt/, accessed 2013-09-05
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