Metagrammatical Knowledge for Grammars and Corpora

今天，理论语言学家（所有框架）和自然语言处理（NLP）的研究人员对我们在自然语言中遇到的句法现象达成了广泛的共识。 然而，对这些现象的分析有许多不同的框架，甚至在一个单一框架内的具体分析也存在分歧。 因此，语言资源，如注释语料库或语法不能很容易地跨框架重用。 这个项目将调查在语言学和自然语言处理工作的基础上的句法的共同分类。 这种潜在的分类被称为“元语法”。 给定一个元语法，可以生成一个工具来自动生成不同框架中的语法。 这项研究包括三项主要活动。 第一个涉及几种语言（包括英语）的比较工作，这将导致这些语言的协调元语法。 这些独立于框架的规范将对语法属性进行分类，并详细说明它们可能的交互;语言之间共享的类别将导致元语法的共享部分。 第二个是关于特定语法陈述的发展，这些语法陈述将元语法范畴与特定框架和特定语言中的结构联系起来。 正是这些陈述在它们的相互作用中决定了词序。 第三个项目是用元语法中的句法属性对Penn Treebank（PTB）语料库进行注释，从而使PTB中隐含的信息变得清晰，并可被其他框架使用，这将使NLP和语言学社区更好地分享对句法现象的见解。 此外，这项工作将使新的NLP工具的开发更少地依赖于特定的表示。 它将使语言学家能够为不同的框架和语言快速开发语法和测试套件，从而允许跨框架和跨框架评估语言语法。 项目完成后，将向研究界提供用元语法的高级类别重新注释的PTB。

There is today a broad consensus among theoretical linguists (of all frameworks) and researchers in Natural Language Processing (NLP) about what the syntactic phenomena are that we encounter in natural languages. However, there are many different frameworks in which analyses of these phenomena have been implemented, and there is even disagreement about specific analyses within one single framework. As a result, linguistic resources such as annotated corpora or grammars cannot be easily reused across frameworks. This project will investigate the common categorization of syntax that underlies work in linguistics and NLP. This underlying categorization is called a ``metagrammar''. Given a metagrammar, a tool can be produced to automatically generate grammars in different frameworks. This research contains three main activities. The first involves comparative work in several languages (including English) that will lead to coordinated metagrammars for these languages. These framework-independent specifications will catalog syntactic properties and detail their possible interaction; categories shared between languages will lead to shared portions of the metagrammar. The second concerns the development of specific grammar statements that relate metagrammatical categories to constructs in particular frameworks and for particular languages. It is these statements that, in their interaction, determine word order. The third involves annotating the Penn Treebank (PTB) corpus with the syntactic properties from the metagrammar, thus making the information implicitly encoded in the phrase structure of the PTB explicit and usable by other frameworks.This project will enable the NLP and linguistics communities to better share insights on syntactic phenomena. Additionally, the work will enable the development of new NLP tools that are less dependent on a particular representation. It will enable linguists to rapidly develop grammars and test-suites for different frameworks and languages, thus allowing for both cross- and inter-framework evaluation of linguistic grammars. Upon completion of the project, the PTB re-annotated with the high-level categories of the metagrammar will be made available to the research community .