A computational grammar and lexicon for Maltese

In many cases it is helpful to choose one more reference languages, that is languages which
have already been implemented in the RGL and which are familiar to the grammarian. Checking
the linearisation of certain constructions in such a reference before implementing them in
the current language is often useful. However, this comes with the proviso that resource grammars
are not intended for general translation ‘out of the box’. Rather, they should provide the
means for an application grammarian to express what they want in a grammatically correct
way. For this reason it can often be hard to judge whether the translation produce by a resource
grammar is correct or not, as it would depend on the use of that grammar within the
context of an application grammar.
2.4.3 Treebanks
A number of treebank files were written during development to test different specific aspects
of the grammar. These treebanks are listed in table 2.20. In order to speed up the test-develop
cycle, a simple script was written for linearising sets of test trees against the current grammar
and indicating those those which are linearised incorrectly. The script is written in Haskell and
uses the PGF Haskell library 7 which is provided as part of the GF distribution. The script, along
with the treebank files themselves, can be found under the test/regression/ directory of this
work’s source code repository (see appendix D).
The treebank files are written in a specific format which uses Org-mode syntax for plain
text tables 8 . An example of this format is given below:
| AST | English | Maltese |
|------------------------------------------------------+-------------------+-----------------|
| DetCN (DetQuant IndefArt NumSg) (UseN airplane_N) | an airplane | ajruplan |
| DetCN (DetQuant DefArt NumSg) (UseN airplane_N) | the airplane | l-ajruplan |
Verb inflection treebank
In addition to the treebanks listed in table 2.20, it would also be relevant to mention a small
treebank of Maltese verb inflections also compiled during this work. This treebank 9 consists
of full inflection tables of 74 Maltese verbs of different paradigms, which have been tabulated
in CSV format. This amounts to a total of 70,448 unique wordforms which have been manually
checked. Unfortunately these could not be converted to the required format in the time
available and are thus excluded from the results in the next section.
7 http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/gf/3.1.6.2/doc/html/PGF.html, accessed 2013-09-05
8 http://orgmode.org/manual/Tables.html, accessed 2013-07-23
9 Refer to appendix D for more details.
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