Form and function: a study on the distribution of the inflectional endings in Italian nouns and adjectives.

Inflectional values, such as singular and plural, sustain agreement relations between constituents in sentences, allowing sentence parsing and prediction in online processing.Ideally, these processes would be facilitated by a consistent and transparent correspondence between the inflectional values and their form: for example, the value of plural should always be expressed by the same ending, and that ending should only express plural.Experimental research reports higher processing costs in presence of a non-transparent relation between endings and values. While this effect was found in several languages, and typological research shows that consistency is far from common in morphological paradigms, it is still somewhat difficult to precisely quantify the degree of transparency of inflected forms.Furthermore, to date, no accounts have quantified the extent to which transparency in inflection is expressed across different parts of speech, depending on whether these act as controllers of the agreement (e.g., nouns) or as targets (e.g., adjectives), and how it relates to the declensional classes.We present a case study on Italian, a language that marks gender and number features in nouns and adjectives. This work provides measures of the distribution of forms in the noun and adjective inflection in Italian, quantifies the degree of form-value transparency with respect to inflectional endings and declensional classes. In order to obtain these measures, we built Flex It, a dedicated large-scale database of inflectional morphology of Italian, and made it available, in order to sustain further theoretical and empirical and research.

Malay Single Sentence Parser

Parser is a process of classifying sentence structures of a language. Parser receives a sentence and breaks it up into correct phrases. The purpose of this research is to develop a Malay single sentence parser that can help primary school students to learn Malay language according to the correct phrases. This is because research in Malay sentence parsing has not gotten enough attention from researchers to the extent of building parser prototypes. This research used top-down parsing technique, and grammar chosen was context-free grammar (CFG) for Malay language. However, to parse a sentence with correct phrase was a difficult task due to lack of resources for obtaining Malay lexicon. Malay lexicon is a database that stores thousands of words with their correct phrases. Therefore, this research developed a Malay lexicon based on an article from Dewan Masyarakat magazine. In conclusion, this research can provide help to the primary school students to organize correct Malay single sentences.

Measuring the impact of collocational knowledge on sentence parsing

In this paper we focus on collocations, which have been studied in computational linguistics since they constitute a key factor when processing natural languages. For instance, they usually represent a challenge in automatic translation because the association of two terms is not easily computed. We proposed that the parser should be provided with a lexical database in order to make more effective the identification of collocations during the parsing process. We assessed this claim by using a corpus of 6’000 sentences retrieved from the British magazine The Economist Espresso. The corpus was parsed twice, first with the collocation detection component turned on and then with it turned off, and to make the comparison the Fips tagger was used. The results showed an improvement of the quality when the parser has access to collocation knowledge.