Autogramm

The aim of this project is to automate, insofar as possible, the extraction of descriptive grammars and grammatical descriptions from annotated corpora, for the purpose of linguistic and typological studies. We aim for descriptions which 1) highlight the main properties of the corpus (and by extension the language or variety the corpus represents); 2) are easily understandable to a linguist; 3) can be visualized by texts, diagrams, or tables, as well as grammatical databases generally oriented towards comparative and typological studies; and 4) whose size and precision can be adapted to the user’s requirements. Because these grammatical descriptions are induced from a corpus, they contain quantitative information associated with each observation made on that corpus, as well as relevant examples extracted from it. Our grammatical descriptions will be extracted from two types of corpora which are available for a wide array of languages and which contain rich information for inferring their structural properties: - Treebanks from the Universal Dependencies [UD] treebanks collection (a hundred languages, 12M words). A treebank is an annotated corpus where each sentence is associated with a syntactic tree; UD is based on dependency syntax, where words are linked by dependency relations. - The Pangloss and CorpOrAn collection (hosted by the Lacito and Llacan laboratories) are two of the few international archives aimed at preserving the linguistic heritage of the world. They contain corpora of under-resourced languages collected by field linguists which represent the diversity of linguistic structures beyond the realm of European languages. Such corpora are structured as interlinear glossed texts [IGTs]: oral corpora transcribed, translated, segmented into morphemes and glossed. Several languages from these archives will be used for the manual and automatic enrichment of IGTs with syntactic annotations. Our main objectives are the following: 1. Extract from a corpus a set of grammatical patterns or constructions a. taking into account the frequency of the observed phenomena, b. through an inductive methodology, allowing the discovery of patterns that do not necessarily appear in existing grammars; 2. Order the list of patterns in terms of relevance; 3. Compare the sets of patterns observed in the different corpora, representing typologically diverse languages, in order to build typological generalizations about differences and structural identity between sets of patterns; 4. Propose an efficient processing chain for the simultaneous development of a treebank and a grammar. 5. Develop treebanks and descriptive grammars for a dozen languages thanks to our processing chain. This development work will focus on under-resourced (non-Indo-European) languages (diverse in terms of typological profile, geographic spread, and genetic affiliation). Some of the languages we will study are endangered (Tuwari and Zaar) or threatened (Salar, Sungwadia, Ye’kawana). 6. Compare languages through observations taking into account the frequency of phenomena, which lead us to a quantitative and inductive typology, i.e. taking into account the specificities of the language and the properties induced by the analysis of the data. The project brings together a variety of specialists, including field linguists with corpora of the languages they specialize in, of which they would like to develop new descriptions; linguists interested in language comparison and typology; specialists in the development of annotated corpora and more particularly syntactic treebanks, with extensive knowledge of the development of formal grammars; and finally, researchers in natural language processing who are interested in machine learning, graph rewriting and the development of tools for the development of linguistic resources and the study of languages.