A computational grammar and lexicon for Maltese

more regular. For verb inflections, the morphological processes are in fact more regular and
the argument in favour of only generating full forms becomes stronger.
One could imagine a system which combines both a morphological automaton together
with a database of full forms as some kind override to the former. In many ways, GF lexicons
defined using smart paradigms essentially work in this way. However GF itself is not really
suitable as a final storage format for a lexicon because it essentially enforces a fixed schema on
its entries, and extending it with new words from different sources may require considerable
refactoring.
This work opts for the former of the options presented above, that is storing all forms in a
single database, without the use of any real-time morphological generator. Apart from making
the system design simpler, this means that the lexicon can more effectively searched (using
regular expressions, for example) and that its contents can be more easily converted or exported
to some other format.
Size calculations
Dalli (2002a) estimates that at least 30,000 lemmas must be identified in order to have significant
coverage of all the Maltese language. As a comparison, Serracino-Inglott’s Maltese dictionary
(Serracino-Inglott, 2003) contains roughly 26,000 entries, while the Maltese-English volumes of
Aquilina’s (Aquilina, 1987, 1990) contain some 80,000. The total number of entries from the
sources listed in the previous section amounts to almost 13,000. Note however that this does
not take into account the duplicate entries appearing from different sources; the number of
unique entries will therefore likely be lower.
Considering the worst-case inflectional forms of each of the major parts of speech, we have:
• Nouns have 5 plural forms, each of which can appear with or without enclitic pronouns,
giving an upper bound of 40 word forms.
• Verbs have 952 forms (see appendix C) for the main moods/aspects, and 14 for present
and past participles (which take no enclitic pronouns). This gives a total of 966 verb word
forms.
• Adjectives have 3 inflection cases and 3 forms, making a total of 9 possible combinations.
• We will ignore inflections of other word classes such as prepositions and pronouns, as
such structural words are generally of a fixed, small number.
In order to now estimate the total number of forms required over an entire lexicon, we must
establish the distribution of the different parts of speech in a Maltese dictionary. An analysis of
the digitised version of the Aquilina dictionary (MLRS, 2013) gives a worst-case total number of
forms of 86 million. This calculation is broken down in table 3.1. While this figure is higher than
Dalli’s estimation of around 64 million unique wordforms (Dalli, 2002a, p. 69), it is certainly in
the same order of magnitude. He goes on to estimate an average case of around 5.7 million
unique wordforms (based on an “average word form” count of 72 (Mangion, 1999, p. 65)).
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