A computational grammar and lexicon for Maltese

constructions apply to Maltese too, such as verb phrase conjunction via the VPI category.
• If the resource grammar is to be used for parsing of open-domain text, a specific parse
grammar should be written which augments the current resource grammar with variants
for spelling and word orders.
• Perhaps the best way of testing the robustness of a resource grammar is to use it as a
library in some domain-specific application grammar. Numerous application grammars
in GF have been developed over the years in various sizes, and adding Maltese versions of
these grammars can serve as a quick and fun way of testing the behaviour of the resource
grammar.
4.4.2 Lexing solution
The bind solution for affixation in GF is described in section 2.5.2. This solves a problem when
linearising text, however introduces a problem when attempting to parse. These bind tokens
need to be re-introduced during lexing, but this is not necessarily a trivial task. To date, no
satisfactory and general solution exists for this problem within GF, which means that grammars
using binding for affixation can perform very poorly when it comes to parsing.
Having a solution to this lexing problem would benefit many of the languages in the RGL.
Ideally this process should be handled internally by the GF runtime itself, using a grammar’s
own rules to extract a lexer. Solving this within the GF runtime would mean that it would
instantly benefit all languages using binding.
4.4.3 A linked Maltese WordNet
Given a computational lexicon with English glosses, one could use this for reverse-lookup and
attempt to create a linked version of the Princeton WordNet. This would involve looking up
each entry from the English WordNet in the Maltese lexicon and using each result as a translation.
Some work on using linked WordNets to bootstrap large-scale GF dictionaries has already
been carried out with Bulgarian, German, Finnish and Hindi, with varying levels of success
(Virk, 2013, ch. 5).
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