A computational grammar and lexicon for Maltese

A computational lexicon
As an initial step to the creation of a lexicon, a platform for the collection of lexical resources
in Maltese will be created. This collection will be hosted online and searchable in a single way,
and all data should be extractable and easily convertible into other formats. It will initially be
populated with data from the resources listed in section 1.2.5.
Choosing a highly flexible storage representation will allow new resources to be easily
added to the collection as they become available. In this way we hope to enable to organic
growth of a computational lexicon for Maltese, and thus avoid some of the startup problems
encountered in previous attempts at building one (see section 1.2.3).
By then combining this collection of lexical resources with the morphological generation
from the resource grammar, we will extend this collection of resources into a full-form lexicon.
Such lexicons are useful for spell checking and lemmatisation, particularly in morphologicallyrich
languages such as Maltese where the concept of automatically-derivable word stem is not
so prominent. Including all inflectional forms in a lexicon will increase the number of word
forms by a few orders of magnitude (in the case of Maltese). This work is very repetitive but
also not viably done manually, making it an ideal candidate for rule-based production by a
computational grammar. This full-form lexicon will take two forms:
1. A searchable online database which stores all word forms (both generated and manually
imported from other sources).
2. A monolingual GF dictionary module (DictMlt.gf), which uses smart paradigms to keep
the lexicon as compact as possible.
1.4.3 Organisation
The remainder of this monograph is organised as follows. Chapter 2 covers the implementation
of the Maltese resource grammar, including the testing carried out during development.
Chapter 3 then covers the design of the platform for the collection of lexical resources, using
the resource grammar to generate full inflection forms and the creation of a monolingual dictionary
module. Finally in chapter 4 we make some conclusions about the value of this thesis
in the context of other related works and discuss some directions for future work.
The appendices contain a description of the RGL API and the lexical paradigms available
in the Maltese implementation, analyses of certain linguistic phenomena relevant to the design
of the resource grammar, and information about licensing and obtaining the source code for all
the work described in this thesis.
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