A computational grammar and lexicon for Maltese

Web application
• The user interface for the web application was designed in an ad hoc manner and no real
study or research was performed into user interfaces for online lexica. No tracking of
website usage is recorded by the application, so there is thus no way of analysing usage
in order to improve the interface.
• The user facilities for reporting mistakes and adding new contributions to the lexicon
are completely anonymous and there is no protection against spam. Requiring users to
register and login before providing feedback would increase the number of steps required
and likely reduce the amount feedback received.
• A single bug in the morphological grammar can produce hundreds or thousands of incorrect
word forms. Firstly, this may be distracting to users who may try to flag each of
them individually (with no added benefit). Secondly, no method has been put in place
for regenerating incorrect word forms after making a change in the grammar.
4.3 Related work
4.3.1 Computational linguistics resources for Maltese
Much of the background for Maltese computational linguistics — in particular the Maltilex
project — is discussed in section 1.2.3. This section mentions some more disparate works which
are or less direct relevance or use to this work. A useful background on some of the past work
in Maltese computation linguistics can be found in (Dalli, 2002a, section 2.5).
The earliest mentioned morphological analyser for Maltese seems to been written by Galea
(1996) in an undergraduate project entitled “Morphological Analysis of Maltese Verbs”. Unfortunately
neither the source code nor the publication itself were available at the time of writing.
Another verb morphology generator for Maltese was written by Ramon Casha from the
Malta Linux User Group. The work is unpublished and was obtained via personal communication
with the author. While it is known to have been used to generate a aspell dictionary for
Maltese 1 , no metrics for its coverage could be found. A continuation of this work has recently
been undertaken by Mike Vella 2 .
A proprietary online English-Maltese dictionary is maintained by Ian Vella 3 , containing
some 12,219 English entries. The dictionary contains no other lexical information.
Methods for building a computational lexicon for Maltese based on corpus extraction are
covered at length in (Dalli, 2002b). The primary difficulty with this approach is that stemming
or lemmatisation in a language with a rich, non-concatenative morphology is especially tough.
Dalli et al. (2004) describes the use of web services for linguistic resources, focusing mainly
on system architectures and communication protocols. Web service technologies have matured
1 ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/aspell/dict/mt, accessed 2013-09-04
2 https://github.com/vellamike/maltese-spell-checker, accessed 2013-09-04
3 http://www.englishmaltesedictionary.com/mt.htm, accessed 2013-07-18
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