Liza Zimina in the MLT programme will defend her thesis "GF Japanese Resource Grammar". Opponent: Linqiqige Zhuo

ABSTRACT

This thesis describes the implementation of the open-source Japanese resource grammar as a part of the GF Resource Grammar Library (RGL). GF (Grammatical Framework) is a grammar formalism for multilingual grammars and their applications intended at performing various natural language processing tasks. The RGL is a set of natural language grammars with a shared abstract syntax and different concrete parts implemented in GF.

The Japanese resource grammar covers all the categories and rules of the GF abstract syntax, thus providing the full correlation with the resource grammars of other languages in the RGL. Due to some peculiarities of the Japanese language, the process of grammar development was complicated by a number of challenges that had not been observed before in the implementation of other GF grammars. One of the most important peculiarities is stylistic stratification in Japanese, which deeply affects its morphology and syntax. Moreover, a number of syntactic constructions predetermined in the abstract syntax are hardly possible in the natural Japanese language (e.g. some types of complex subordinate clauses). Being typologically distant from the European languages, Japanese brings up new issues in the discussion on the universal properties of languages and disputes the generality of some rules in the GF abstract syntax.

Full text (preliminary version): http://www.ling.gu.se/~lager/MLT/zimina_thesis_draft.pdf