Describing Morphologically-rich Languages using Metagrammars: a Look at Verbs in Ikota

Denys Duchier (1) , Brunelle Magnana Ekoukou (2) , Yannick Parmentier (1) , Simon Petitjean (1) , Emmanuel Schang (2)

1 LIFO - Laboratoire d'Informatique Fondamentale d'Orléans
2 LLL - Laboratoire Ligérien de Linguistique

In this paper, we show how the concept of metagrammar originally introduced by Candito (1996) to design large Tree-Adjoining Grammars describing the syntax of French and Italian, can be used to describe the morphology of Ikota, a Bantu language spoken in Gabon. Here, we make use of the expressivity of the XMG (eXtensible MetaGrammar) formalism to describe the morphological variations of verbs in Ikota. This XMG specification captures generalizations over these morphological variations. In order to produce the inflected forms, one can compile the XMG specification, and save the resulting electronic lexicon in an XML file, thus favorising its reuse in dedicated applications.

Domaines: Informatique et langage [cs.CL]; Linguistique

Denys Duchier, Brunelle Magnana Ekoukou, Yannick Parmentier, Simon Petitjean, Emmanuel Schang. Describing Morphologically-rich Languages using Metagrammars: a Look at Verbs in Ikota. Workshop on "Language technology for normalisation of less-resourced languages", 8th SALTMIL Workshop on Minority Languages and the 4th workshop on African Language Technology, May 2012, Istanbul, Turkey. pp.55-60. ⟨hal-00688643⟩