AGGREGATION

Abstract

The AGGREGATION Project aims to bring the benefits of grammar engineering to language documentation without requiring field linguists to become grammar engineers. We achieve this by automatically creating precision grammars on the basis of analyses and annotations already produced by field linguists together with a typologically-grounded cross-linguistic grammar resource (the LinGO Grammar Matrix) and natural language processing techniques developed for high-resource languages.

Precision grammars are machine-readable encodings of mutually-consistent linguistic hypotheses, in our case, concerning morphotactics, morphosyntax and the syntax-semantics interface. They can be used to automatically process text, assigning structures to input strings and strings to input semantic representations. Text processed in this way can then be searched for sentences or word forms with structures of interest or items that are not covered by the grammar (i.e. fall outside current hypotheses).