A computational grammar and lexicon for Maltese

Importing data
Importing of data into the database was carried out using a number of scripts written in Haskell
and using the mongoDB Haskell library 4 . The general steps in each case are described below.
Verbal roots project database This data was available as a MySQL database, with one table
for roots and another for verb forms. The import script made use of the mysql-simple Haskell
library 5 to query the database directly and insert the data into MongoDB.
Broken plurals This resource is made available in tab-separated format, which was straightforward
to process. Each line of the original file contained a new form. In cases of adjectives,
two singular entries would have the same plural e.g. abjad (m.sg.) and bajda (f.sg.) are separate
entries which both have the plural bojod (‘white’). The import script therefore detects these
cases and labels them as adjectives. However this can fail with animate nouns which also have
two genders, e.g. tabib (‘male doctor’), tabiba (‘female doctor’) and tobba (‘doctors’). In these
cases the POS needs to be corrected manually since the source gives no other information to
help disambiguation.
Verbal nouns In this case, the word list was only available as a Microsoft Word document
containing a table spanning many pages. As this format is less amenable to direct extraction,
the data was first copied-and-pasted into a text editor. This step eliminated the table structure
by placing every cell on a new line, which could then be more easily processed using standard
techniques. A disadvantage of this step is that all formatting information was lost in the
conversion. In particular, entries formatted in italics indicating hypothetical words could no
longer be distinguished.
Basic English-Maltese dictionary
This dictionary has been made available in an XML format
and therefore highly amenable to automatic processing. The import script for this resource uses
the xml Haskell library 6 for parsing XML. Unlike each of the importation steps described above,
which work in isolation and provide non-overlapping sets of data, the importation of an entire
dictionary must be able to handle duplicates. That is, if the lemma being imported already
exists in the collection then their data should be merged, rather than a duplicate entry being
created. The script runs in a batch mode but keeps logs about what entries were merged, which
must be checked manually.
4 http://hackage.haskell.org/package/mongoDB, accessed 2013-09-01
5 http://hackage.haskell.org/package/mysql-simple, accessed 2013-09-01
6 http://hackage.haskell.org/package/xml, accessed 2013-09-03
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