A computational grammar and lexicon for Maltese

Anchored regex db.wordforms.find({"surface_form":/^skrej/}) < 100
General regex db.wordforms.find({"surface_form":/skrej/}) ~ 4000
One could use an alternative engine for searching, e.g. Apache Solr 9 . However the response
times in the application are generally acceptable and do not warrant a more heavy-duty solution.
Native sorting
MongoDB has a sort command which uses an inbuilt sorting algorithm for ordering documents
by some field. Specifically, when sorting Unicode strings the database engine will sort in order
of binary representation. Apart from not being able to perform case-insensitive searches, this
also means that one cannot search according lexicographically according to the Maltese alphabet;
the letters ċ, ġ, ħ and ż are incorrectly sorted after the letter z, and għ and ie are not correctly
treated a digraphs.
This means, for example, that ġara (‘neighbour’) would be sorted after zuntier (‘churchyard’),
though it should come before it. Since the sorting scheme does not support digraphs,
a word containing the għ such as għaraf (‘he recognised’) is erroneously sorted after gara (‘he
threw’). Sorting by custom collations is not currently supported by the MongoDB engine, however
it has been marked a planned feature 10 . Until this is implemented, sorting can instead be
performed at the application level. The disadvantage with this is that it excludes the possibility
of using the database engine to efficiently provide pagination by combining the sort() and
limit() commands.
3.3 Monolingual GF dictionary
With all the lexical entries gathered together in a computational lexicon, a monolingual GF
grammar module can be easily constructed. In following the RGL convention, this consists
of matching abstract and concrete modules named DictMltAbs.gf and DictMlt.gf respectively.
These are included with the rest of the Maltese resource grammar described in chapter 2.
3.3.1 Method
The method for generating a monolingual GF dictionary from a word list is quite straightforward:
1. For each lemma in the lexicon, a valid GF function identifier is generated which is guaranteed
to be unique. This is often an ASCII-ised version of the lemma combined with
some unique identifier and suffixed with the POS. In the case of verbs, for example, we
9 http://lucene.apache.org/solr/, accessed 2013-08-27
10 https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-1920, accessed 2013-08-27
56