A computational grammar and lexicon for Maltese

Head- driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) (Pollard & Sag, 1994) is a highly lexicalised
generative grammar theory, where the lexicon has a richly structured hierarchy of types.
In most applications, HPSG grammars are used as stand-alone wide-coverage parsers. Sign-
Based Construction Grammar (SBCG) (Sag et al. , 2012) is a more recent formalism based on
HPSG. The LinGO Grammar Matrix (Bender et al. , 2002) is an HPSG-based framework for
the development of broad-coverage, precision, implemented grammars for diverse languages.
LingGO Matrix grammars are available under open source licenses.
CCGs, TAGs and Head Grammars have been shown to all be weakly equivalent to each
other, in the sense that they all define the same string languages (Vijay-Shanker & Weir, 1994).
Regulus (Rayner et al. , 2006) is a multilingual platform for compiling unification grammars
for speech-based applications. It provides open-source resource grammars for a handful of
languages.
Functional morphology (FM) (Forsberg & Ranta, 2004) presents a method for implementing
natural language morphology in Haskell, which has been applied to small number of languages.
It can be thought of as a fragment of GF embedded in Haskell, yet some phenomena
such as stem-internal vowel changes are easier to write in FM due to Haskell’s more powerful
string and list processing functions.
4.3.4 Rule-based translation
Apertium 8 is an open-source system for rule-based machine translation (RBMT). Unlike GF,
its rules are transfer-based and there is no language-independent representation of meaning.
Partial implementations exist for translation from Maltese to Arabic 9 and Hebrew 10 , but these
could not be used in any tangible way in the current work.
GramTrans 11 is a cross-platform machine translation platform which is also transfer based.
It offers free web-based translation for the Scandinavian languages, but the source code is proprietary.
4.4 Future work
4.4.1 Grammar extensions
• The primary task that this work leads to is of course increasing the coverage of the resource
grammar to include the failed cases from the treebank tests, and the other limitations
in the grammar noted in section 4.2.1. The treebanks accompanying the grammar
should also be extended accordingly.
• The Extra abstract module distributed with GF is not a part of the RGL API but contains a
number of constructions which languages can optionally implement. Many of these extra
8 http://www.apertium.org/, accessed 2013-07-24
9 http://sourceforge.net/p/apertium/svn/46324/tree/staging/apertium-mt-ar/, accessed 2013-07-24
10 http://sourceforge.net/p/apertium/svn/46324/tree/staging/apertium-mt-he/, accessed 2013-07-24
11 http://gramtrans.com/, accessed 2013-09-04
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