A computational grammar and lexicon for Maltese

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InterActive Terminology for Europe (IATE) The IATE 2 is the European Union’s multilingual term base used by various institutions for the collection, dissemination and shared management of EU-specific terminology. It was launched in 1999 as a web-based infrastructure for all EU terminology resources. IATE incorporates and standardises all existing terminology databases of the EU’s translation services into a single database. It also includes a number of legacy databases, and now contains a total of approximately 1.4 million multilingual entries or 8.4 million terms, covering all 23 languages of the EU (including Maltese). 1.2.3 The Maltilex project There has long been an interest in creating a computational lexicon for Maltese, though to date no concrete system yet exists. The Maltilex project was first announced in 1998, identifying the need for such a lexicon and outlining the scope of the project for creating one (Rosner et al. , 1998). Rosner et al. (1999) go on to highlight the automatic extraction idea, involving tokenising and performing headword identification on a corpus in order to obtain a lexicon. In his M.Sc. thesis, Dalli (2002a) describes a concrete implementation of this, using a weaklysupervised learning approach. The work details at length the machine learning algorithms enabling extraction this, adapting clustering techniques from bio-informatics. It also introduces the Lexicon Structuring Technique (LST), which attempts to identify lemmas in an unstructured list of words without requiring any prior rules. Sadly, the only Maltese corpus available at the time was very small (~2000 tokens) and the end results were very noisy and not practically usable. Despite the corpus size having today grown to 100 million words, it seems this experiment has not been carried out again with the new larger corpus. A later student project by Attard (2005) concentrates on the infrastructure required for implementing such a lexicon as a collection of services. Despite going into significant technical detail, the framework suffered from lack of flexibility and was not adopted in any lasting way by the project. As the Maltilex project evolved into the Maltese Language Resource Server (MLRS), a new description of a lexicon structure was presented in Rosner et al. (2006). This paper describes the use of an Object Description Language (ODL) for the specification of the attributes and values that make up each lexical class, effectively acting as a kind of type system for a set of key-value pairs. However it is not clear that such a model has actually been written in ODL for Maltese. The paper only briefly treats the implementation of the lexicon database itself, noting only how the relational model is not entirely suitable and that no satisfactory storage format had yet been decided upon. The most recent development in this road towards a computational lexicon is the announcement of a project to create a national online dictionary for Maltese 3 . Rather than focusing on extraction from a corpus, the project will instead be digitising Aquilina’s Maltese-English dic- 2 http://iate.europa.eu/iatediff/brochure/IATEbrochure_MT.pdf, accessed 2013-08-21 3 National Council for the Maltese Language. http://kunsilltalmalti.gov.mt/projects, accessed 2013-06-24 7
tionary and making it available online. At the time of writing, the project is still in the process of updating the original dictionary to include modern entries and had not yet entered the digitisation phase (personal communication, July 2013). 1.2.4 MLSS As part of the Metanet4U initiative, the Maltese Language Software Services (MLSS) 4 portal has recently made available a number of language-processing tools for Maltese. These tools cover the following tasks: • paragraph and sentence splitting • tokenisation (splitting running text into individual tokens) • part of speech tagging (categorising each token in running text with its part of speech) 1.2.5 Other resources Maltese root-and-pattern verb database The online database of root-and-pattern verbs (Camilleri & Spagnol, 2013) is based on the exhaustive enumeration of 1,923 roots and over 4,142 verbs by Spagnol (2011). The original data was converted from Excel format into a relational database, with a web-based interface then built around it. This interface provides the ability to search for roots and verbs quickly using regular expression syntax. In addition to information on roots, classes and derived forms from the original source, fields for English gloss, transitivity information, and verb frequency were also added. The database is hosted on the Maltese Language Resource Server (MLRS) 5 and provides both a user interface and a JSON web service. Corpus of broken plurals Mayer et al. (2013) have put together a large corpus of broken plurals in Maltese, containing 654 singular-broken plural pairs mainly based on a list of synchronically used or known broken plurals compiled by Schembri (2012). The study is based on a comprehensive inventory of broken plural forms which an average educated speaker of Maltese would be expected to have. In cases of a broken plural having multiple variants, only the most common or frequent is given. The corpus also includes a small number of collective forms, such as basal (‘onions’) and ġebel (‘stones’), which share the same CV structure of broken plurals but which differ morphosyntactically. It is available in CSV format from the MLRS 6 website. 4 http://metanet4u.research.um.edu.mt/, accessed 2013-05-03 5 http://mlrs.research.um.edu.mt/resources/verbalroots/, accessed 2013-05-03 6 http://mlrs.research.um.edu.mt/index.php?page=33, accessed 2013-08-14 8
Page 1 and 2: A Computational Grammar and Lexicon
Page 3 and 4: The research work disclosed in this
Page 5 and 6: Abstract A Computational Grammar an
Page 7 and 8: Contents 1 Introduction and backgro
Page 9 and 10: 4.3.1 Computational linguistics res
Page 11 and 12: B.2 Analysis of verb participles .
Page 13 and 14: Conventions The following conventio
Page 15 and 16: Maltese today is still Semitic in o
Page 17 and 18: The definite article is the proclit
Page 19: ible to the author (and thus not li
Page 23 and 24: Abstract syntax At the language-ind
Page 25 and 26: Maltese concrete syntax For the Mal
Page 27 and 28: Foods> linearize Pred (These Cheese
Page 29 and 30: purposes. 1.4 Goals This section su
Page 31 and 32: Chapter 2 Resource grammar This cha
Page 33 and 34: 2.2.2 Verb The verb is arguably the
Page 35 and 36: Table 2.3: Derivational forms for t
Page 37 and 38: Verb : Type = { s : VForm => VerbSt
Page 39 and 40: one plural form. This change will b
Page 41 and 42: Table 2.11: Inflection table for tw
Page 43 and 44: Table 2.14 shows a few words from d
Page 45 and 46: fi (‘in’) il- bieb fil-bieb (
Page 47 and 48: oper Pronoun = { s : PronForm => St
Page 49 and 50: shows how each of them is expressed
Page 51 and 52: 2.3.6 Clauses The RGL covers three
Page 53 and 54: While designed primarily for applic
Page 55 and 56: 2.4.4 Coverage Abstract function im
Page 57 and 58: 2.5.2 Binding of runtime tokens Bin
Page 59 and 60: param P = P1 | P2 | P3 | P4 ; linca
Page 61 and 62: where the data structure does not i
Page 63 and 64: Table 3.1: Estimation of the number
Page 65 and 66: Importing data Importing of data in
Page 67 and 68: Figure 3.3: Searching for a wordfor
Page 69 and 70: Anchored regex db.wordforms.find({"
Page 71 and 72:
3.4 Generating full forms After cre
Page 73 and 74:
Chapter 4 Conclusions This final ch
Page 75 and 76:
Web application • The user interf
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Head- driven Phrase Structure Gramm
Page 79 and 80:
Appendix A Resource grammar structu
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QS question where did she live fejn
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form6 VDerivedForm Binyan VI: twie
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mkV_VII Str -> Str -> Root -> V For
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Appendix B Lexicon analyses B.1 Ana
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computer_N 1 kompjuter - - kompjute
Page 91 and 92:
plastic_N 3 plastik - - - - policem
Page 93 and 94:
eathe_V respira - - burn_V ħaraq -
Page 95 and 96:
tie_V2 qafel - maqful travel_V vvja
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Appendix C Inflectional forms of a
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Perf. P1 Pl P3 Sg Masc P1 Pl - - Pe
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Perf. P2 Pl P3 Sg Masc P3 Sg Fem ft
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Perf. P3 Sg Fem P3 Sg Fem P2 Sg fet
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Impf. P1 Sg P3 Sg Fem P3 Pl niftaħ
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Impf. P2 Sg P3 Pl P2 Pl - - Impf. P
Page 109 and 110:
Impf. P3 Sg Fem - - tiftaħ tiftaħ
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Imp. P2 Sg P2 Pl - - - Imp. P2 Sg P
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Appendix D Links, source code and l
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s.t. something O object P1, P2, P3
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Bibliography Angelov, Krasimir. 200
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Mangion, Gordon K. 1999. Spelling C
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A computational grammar and lexicon for Maltese

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