A computational grammar and lexicon for Maltese

considerably since this paper was written, and recommendations therein are no longer terribly
relevant.
A standard tag-set for the tagging of textual documents in Maltese has been developed by
Gatt et al. (2003). This tag list, which is used in the annotation of the second version of the
MLRS corpus can also be found on the MLRS website 4 .
4.3.2 GF resource grammars
An undergraduate project at the University of Malta by Zammit (2012) also looked at the implementation
of a GF resource grammar for Maltese. For lack of time, that project focused mainly
on clause-level syntax. Some contributions from that piece of work have helped the design
process of the current version of the grammar. However the source code from this work was
not made available and thus no substantial effort at combining code bases was possible. The
source code presented in this work is all original, and has only been contributed to conceptually
by Zammit.
GF resource grammars exist for numerous languages of all language families and can be
found in various stages of completion. A complete list of publications associated with the other
languages in the GF resource grammar library can be found at the Grammatical Framework
website 5 .
4.3.3 Grammar formalisms
Numerous grammar formalisms have developed in the past few decades which are based on
the natural language theory that the grammatical constituents are distinguished a lexical arguments
or functions from one set of arguments to another. This class of “lexicalised” theories of
grammar are called categorial grammars.
Tree-Adjoining Grammar (TAG) (Joshi & Schabes, 1997) is a formalism similar to contextfree
grammars, which describes the rewriting of trees rather than symbols. The XTAG project 6
uses lexicalised TAGs to build a wide-coverage grammar for English. It also serves as a grammar
development system including a parser and morphological analyser.
Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) (Steedman & Baldridge, 2005) is an efficiently
parsable and linguistically expressive grammar formalism which relies on combinatory logic.
It is another type of phrase-structure grammar, which generates constituency-based structures.
Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) (Kaplan & Bresnan, 1995) is a framework for phrase
structure grammars which focuses mainly on syntax and its relation to morphology and syntax.
The Pargram project 7 is an international collaboration pf LFG-based grammar and semantics
development. It aims to produce wide coverage grammars for a number of languages written
in LFG and with a commonly-agreed-upon set of grammatical features.
4 http://mlrs.research.um.edu.mt/index.php?page=34, accessed 2013-06-09
5 http://www.grammaticalframework.org/lib/doc/rgl-publications.html, accessed 2013-09-04
6 http://www.cis.upenn.edu/x̃tag/, accessed 2013-09-04
7 http://pargram.b.uib.no/, accessed 2013-09-04
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