Computational Syntax

Aarne Ranta
Master's Programme in Language Technology 2012, 7.5 credits

News

23/5 Correction to Friday 25 May lecture location; two new lab session dates (times forthcoming)

16/5 exam from 2011

15/5 exam date 1 June; deadline for assignments 17 June

16/3/2012 adapted this web page to 2012

Schedule

The course starts 2 April and runs till the end of May.

Here is the schedule for lectures. All locations are in Olof Wijksgatan 6, except EDIT8103, which is at Chalmers (Hörsalsvägen 11, 7th floor, connected to CSE lunch room).

date	time	place	subject (preliminary)
Mon 2 April	10-12	T116	Introduction to GF, 1
Mon 2 April	13-15	T225	Lab session
Wed 4 April	10-12	T116	Introduction to GF, 2
Thu 12 April	10-12	T116	Core syntactic structures
Fri 13 April	13-15	T225	Lab session
Tue 17 April	10-12	T116	Implementing core syntax, 1
Wed 18 April	10-12	T225	Lab session
Wed 2 May	10-12	T116	Implementing core syntax, 2
Wed 9 May	10-12	T225	Lab session
Wed 16 May	10-12	T116	Beyond the core syntax
Fri 18 May	13-15	T225	Lab session
Tue 22 May	10-12	T116	Interfacing syntax and semantics
Fri 25 May	10-12	EDIT8103	Applications of computational syntax
Fri 8 June	TBA	TBA	lab session
Tue 19 June	TBA	TBA	lab session

Teachers

Aarne Ranta, lectures

Gregoire Detrez, lab sessions

Material

Aarne Ranta, Grammatical Framework: Programming with Multilingual Grammars. CSLI Publications, Stanford, 2011. Book web page

Slides for the first part of the course are the GF book slides

Slides for the extended grammar used in the assignment: Linguistic Syntax Implementation.

Code examples

GF Reference Manual

Goals

write formal grammars for natural languages
implement those grammars on a computer
know the main syntactic structures of natural languages
know the main issues of syntax in different languages
make syntax interoperable with morphology, lexicon and semantics
make grammars usable in NLP tasks such as machine translation and information retrieval

The programming language for this work will be GF, Grammatical Framework, http://www.grammaticalframework.org/

Examination

Lab work: grammar assignment, writing a concrete syntax for some other language than English (which is given as example). The following steps must be followed at submission:

Copy the latest sources of grammar assignment
Place your own modules Grammar, Lang, Lexicon, Paradigms, Res in the resulting directory extmini/
Go to extmini/
Run the lab test script by:
```
    gf -run LangXXX.gf <compsyntax.gfs
```
replacing XXX with your own language code.
Inspect the resulting file compsyntax-test.txt to decide whether it is OK; it should look similar to compsyntax-test-Ita.txt.
Go one directory up (cd ..) and prepare a tar package by
```
    tar cvfz compsyntax-lab.tar.gz extmini/
```
Log in in the Fire system, http://92.243.11.186/CompSyn/fire
Register your group and submit the file compsyntax-lab.tar.gz

Deadline is 17 June: everyone must submit by the end of that date. The deadline for final corrections is 21 June. If the lab is not accepted by the end of this date, the course credits will not be registered.

Exam: written exam on 1 June at 9-12 at Folkets Hus, Olof Palmes plats 3, plan 3 (close to Järntorget). The exam covers

material in lectures
the GF book, chapters 1-5 and 9

You are allowed to take the GF book with you, but no other materials.

Links

Master's Programme web page