Spring 2018/Contrastive grammar

What constitutes a contrastive grammar for RBMT

• Start by looking at material in the language you're translating into your language.
• For a given way of expressing the same thing (a translation, or equivalent sentence), find differences in the parse, ignoring the content of the lexical items.
• I.e., make sure the full version of the sentence in each language parses correctly (and has correct disambiguation), and then compare the parses side-by-side.
• You'll want to identify any differences in word order, tags used, etc.
  • An example of a similar set of languages might be

    "Je le mangeré": ^je/je<prn><pers><p1><sg><nom>$ ^le/le<prn><pers><p3><m><acc>$ ^mangeré/manger<v><tv><fut><p1><sg>$

    "Yo lo comeré": ^yo/yo<prn><pers><p1><sg><nom>$ ^lo/lo<prn><pers><p3><m><acc>$ ^comeré/comer<v><tv><fut><p1><sg>$

  • An example of a rather different set of languages might be:

    "Yiyemeyeceğim": ^yiyemeyeceğim/ye<v><tv><abil><neg><fut>+i<cop><aor><p1><sg>$

    "I won't be able to eat it": ^I/I<prn><pers><p1><sg><subj>$ ^won't/will<vaux>+not<adv>$ ^be/be<v><iv>$ ^able/able<adj>$ ^to eat/eat<v><tv><inf>$ ^it/it<prn>pers><p3><nt><obj>$

The assignment

Getting started

1. Figure out who you'd like to work with on MT
   • Ideally you'll work with someone who's been working on a closely related or structurally extremely similar language. This may not be feasible in all cases.
   • Also good are languages that are spoken in close proximity to one another or share similar cultural influences, even if unrelated.
   • You may work in groups of 2 or 3, or in some rare cases I may allow groups of 4. In groups of any size, each language should be both a source and destination of translation.
2. Share the corpus, keyboard, and transducer repos with each other. I.e., give each other read access (not necessarily write access).
3. Fork the repos of the language you're translating from. Do this through the github interface.
4. Clone the forked repos locally (in your ~/Source directory).
5. You'll want to look at the corpus repo for this assignment, and you'll want the other stuff around for later. We'll also talk more about forking, pull requests, etc. later.

Parallel corpus

1. Construct a parallel corpus of 10 sentences.

more later

Contrastive grammar

1. Identify at least five differences between the two languages.

{{comment|more later]}