A computational grammar and lexicon for Maltese

as the i/j switching depending on preceding words are not handled at all due to limitations
in GF.
• Sandhi rules, which determine stem changes when enclitic pronouns are suffixed to words
are encoded but there are known exceptions which have not been handled.
• Maltese’ free word order is not captured at all; clauses of a particular type have a fixed
word order.
• Relative clauses have not been extensively tested.
• The current version of the grammar does not pass all the treebank tests created during
the development (see table 2.20).
Evaluation
In addition to known issues in coverage above, it also relevant to mention limitations in the
evaluation process itself.
• The treebanks are developed manually to test known critical areas of the grammar, but
there is no measure of how completely they cover the actual Maltese language. Coverage
of the RGL abstract syntax and coverage of the target language are two different things.
• The calculation of treebank scores is very simply defined as the percentage of successful
linearisations. This means that these scores are essentially skewed by the number of test
trees written to cover each feature of the language. It is likely that in the current treebank
set, verb inflections are covered more extensively than any other aspect of Maltese.
• A typical way to qualitatively test a resource grammar is by using it in an application
grammar for some particular use case. This was not carried out at all as part of this work
for lack of time.
4.2.2 Lexicon limitations
Database
• As mentioned in section 3.2, the chosen database engine does not allow sorting by a custom
collation, which in the case of Maltese means that results shown to the user might
not be sorted as they would expect.
• Despite using database indexes on searchable fields, open regex searches can become
a little slow to execute, depending on the search term used. To alleviate this, all regex
searches received from the web application are prefixed with the beginning-of-string anchor
^. This reduces slightly the search capabilities offered to the user.
• No versioning or auditing of any kind is kept by the database engine, which means that
any changes made are irreversible. This introduces a risk of data corruption which is only
mitigated against by having regular database backups as data dumps.
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