Study and application of explicit grammatical formalisms in the detection of inconsistency in treebanks

• Grant number: 14/17172-1
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Post-doctor
• Start date: January 01, 2015
• End date: September 30, 2015
• Field of knowledge: Interdisciplinary Subjects
• Principal Investigator: Charlotte Marie Chambelland Galves
• Grantee: Pablo Picasso Feliciano de Faria
• Supervisor: Anthony S. Kroch
• Host Institution: Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem (IEL). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: University of Pennsylvania, United States
• Associated to the scholarship: 13/18090-6 - Study and development of methods for automatic detection and correction of errors and inconsistencies in syntactically annotated corpora, BP.PD

Abstract

This research project has as its main goal the study and application of Tree Adjoining Grammar (Joshi & Schabes, 1991) based formalisms to the problem of inconsistency detection in syntactically annotated corpora. The goal is to move from what I call a "naive approach" - where a poor or even no theoretical interpretation of the annotation is carried out - to an informed "theoretical approach" where an explicit grammatical formalism is applied in order to interpret and describe the data. Initial results of (more or less) naive algorithms evaluated in my ongoing research show that, besides other limitations, adjunction and conjoined structures cannot be adequately handled. With the help of explicit grammatical formalisms it is possible to overcome this inadequacy. The expected result of such a move is the increase in precision and coverage of the detection algorithm on the acceptable cost of a probable specialization of the method to particular kinds of annotation. (AU)