<p>In this thesis I have investigated verb frame divergences in a bilingual Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar for machine translation. The purpose was threefold: (1) to describe and classify verb frame divergences (VFDs) between Swedish and English, (2) to practically implement a bilingual grammar that covered many of the identified VFDs and (3) to find out what cases of VFDs could be solved and implemented using a common semantic representation, or interlingua, for Swedish and English.</p><p>The implemented grammar, BiTSE, is a Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar based on the LinGO Grammar Matrix, a language independent grammar base. BiTSE is a bilingual grammar containing both Swedish and English. The semantic representation used is Minimal Recursion Semantics (MRS). It is language independent, so generating from it gives all equivalent sentences in both Swedish and English. Both the core of the languages and a subset of the identified VFDs are successfully implemented in BiTSE. For other VFDs tentative solutions are discussed.</p><p>MRS have previously been proposed as suitable for semantic transfer machine translation. I have shown that VFDs can naturally be handled by an interlingual design in many cases, minimizing the need of transfer.</p><p>The main contributions of this thesis are: an inventory of English and Swedish verb frames and verb frame divergences; the bilingual grammar BiTSE and showing that it is possible in many cases to use MRS as an interlingua in machine translation.</p>

In this thesis I have investigated verb frame divergences in a bilingual Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar for machine translation. The purpose was threefold: (1) to describe and classify verb frame divergences (VFDs) between Swedish and English, (2) to practically implement a bilingual grammar that covered many of the identified VFDs and (3) to find out what cases of VFDs could be solved and implemented using a common semantic representation, or interlingua, for Swedish and English. The implemented grammar, BiTSE, is a Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar based on the LinGO Grammar Matrix, a language independent grammar base. BiTSE is a bilingual grammar containing both Swedish and English. The semantic representation used is Minimal Recursion Semantics (MRS). It is language independent, so generating from it gives all equivalent sentences in both Swedish and English. Both the core of the languages and a subset of the identified VFDs are successfully implemented in BiTSE. For other VFDs tentative solutions are discussed. MRS have previously been proposed as suitable for semantic transfer machine translation. I have shown that VFDs can naturally be handled by an interlingual design in many cases, minimizing the need of transfer. The main contributions of this thesis are: an inventory of English and Swedish verb frames and verb frame divergences; the bilingual grammar BiTSE and showing that it is possible in many cases to use MRS as an interlingua in machine translation.

The phrasal verb is a unique type of verb phrase that consists of a main verb, usually of only one or two syllables, followed by a particle, that works as a single semantic unit. Such meaning, however, is characteristically expressed in idomatic terms, which poses a formidable problem for students of English as a second language. To be understood, this meaning must be figuratively interpreted as well as literally translated.

Thema der Dissertation sind Nominalphrasen im Deutschen und Spanischen. Die Dissertation ist in 5 Abschnitte unterteilt. Das erste Kapitel gibt die Motivation der Arbeit, und im letzten Kapitel werden die Ergebnisse zusammengefasst und mögliche Erweiterungen diskutiert. Im zweiten Kapitel wird eine Einführung in den theoretischen Rahmen, die Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), gegeben und mit generativen Ansätzen verglichen. Dabei werden die Grundlagen und die Beschreibungsmechanismen der Theorie erklärt. HPSG ist ein oberflächenorientiertes, deklaratives, beschränkungsbasiertes Framework. Im dritten Kapitel werden vier zentrale syntaktische Begriffe besprochen und diskutiert: Kopf, Argument, Adjunkt und Spezifikator. Trotz ihrer Relevanz in der linguistischen Literatur werden diese vier Relationen verschieden interpretiert. Bei der Diskussion dieser syntaktischen Hauptrelationen werden die entsprechenden HPSG Mechanismen erklärt, mit denen sie beschrieben werden, u.a. das Semantik-Prinzip und das Kopfmerkmalsprinzip. Das vierte Kapitel der Dissertation beinhaltet Analysen für drei verschiedene Phänomene der NPs im Deutschen und Spanischen: Kasusmarkierung, optionale Argumente und pränominale Argumente. Deutsch und Spanisch unterscheiden sich in der Art und Weise, wie sie Kasus an ihren NPs markieren. Deutsch markiert sie morphologisch und Spanisch syntaktisch. Beide Arten der Markierung werden modelliert und verglichen. In Bezug auf die Optionalität von Argumenten wird zunächst die verbale Domäne betrachtet. Anhand dieser Analyse wird dann die nominale Domäne modelliert. Im letzten Teil wird eine Analyse für die pränominalen Argumente gegeben. Dabei werden folgende Aspekte betrachtet: Kombinatorik verschiedener Argumente, Theta-Rollenvergabe für die Argumente, Fakultativität der Argumente und Behandlung der (In-)Definitheit bei pränominalen Genitiven. / The topic of this dissertation are noun phrases in German and Spanish. This thesis is divided into five chapters. The first chapter presents the motivation of the work, and in the last chapter a summary is presented and discussed. In the second chapter, I give an introduction into the theoretical framework, Head-Driven Phase Structure Grammar (HPSG) by explaining its fundamental mechanisms, and compare it to generative approaches. HPSG is a surface oriented, declarative, constraint-based framework. In the third chapter, four central syntactic concepts are critically discussed: head, argument, adjunct, and specifier. Although these four concepts are highly relevant in the linguistic literature, they are often interpreted differently. While discussing these fours syntactic relations, I explain the main mechanisms of HPSG to describe them, e.g. the Semantic Principle and the Head Feature Principle. The fourth chapter contains analyses for three different NP phenomena in German and Spanish: case marking, optionality of arguments, and prenominal arguments. German and Spanish differ in the way they mark case on their NPs. German case-marks NPs morphologically, while case marking in Spanish is syntactic. Both types of marking are modelled and compared. Regarding argument optionality, I first look at the verbal domain and use this analysis to model optionality in the nominal domain. The last part of this chapter gives an analysis of prenominal arguments. The following aspects are considered: combinatory of a head noun with different arguments, theta role assignment for the arguments of a nominal head, optionality of arguments and treatment of (in-)definiteness in prenominal genitives.

Cette thèse propose une étude quantitative de la variation de l'ordre des constituants en persan avec un intérêt particulier pour l'ordre relatif entre le COD et le COI étant donné son rôle crucial dans les analyses de la structure du SV. Afin de remédier à une lacune empirique dont souffre l’étude de la syntaxe du persan, notre premier objectif est d’évaluer, à partir de données empiriques robustes, l’hypothèse largement admise selon laquelle il existe un ordre relatif canonique dichotomique entre les compléments verbaux, dépendant du marquage différentiel de l'objet (MDO). Notre second objectif, relatif à la linguistique générale et à la typologie, est de contribuer aux débats controversés sur les préférences translinguistiques de l'ordre des mots en étudiant, dans une langue SOV à structure mixte, les effets des facteurs tels que le poids (ou la longueur relative). Les résultats de nos études de corpus et de nos expériences montrent l’inadéquation du critère MDO pour expliquer l’ordre relatif entre le COD et le COI. Cette conclusion nous conduit à réfuter également l’hypothèse de la position syntaxique double de l’objet au profit d’une structure plate pour le SV. De plus, nos données révèlent une préférence « long-avant-court » subordonnée aux facteurs contribuant à la saillance, tels que la définitude, l'animéité et le rôle grammatical. Nous arguons que cette préférence échappe, en partie ou totalement, aux modèles du traitement se fondant sur la distance entre la tête et ses dépendants, alors qu’elle est compatible avec l'hypothèse selon laquelle dans les langues SOV l'accessibilité conceptuelle des constituants longs favorise leur production plus en amont dans la phrase. / This thesis proposes a quantitative study of word order variations in Persian, focusing on the relative order between the direct object (DO) and the indirect object (IO). The latter plays a crucial role in the theoretical analyses of the VP, which in the absence of quantitative studies lack solid empirical underpinning. My first goal is to contribute to the study of Persian syntax by providing reliable data in order to evaluate the prevailing hypothesis according to which there exists a dual canonical relative order between the two objects triggered by the Differential Object marking (DOM). My second goal is to contribute to the ongoing debates on word order preferences in general linguistics and typology by bringing in data on an SOV language with mixed head-direction. To this end, I study the effect of factors such as grammatical weight (or relative length), which are claimed to influence the linear order across languages. First, the results of our corpus and experimental studies show that the DOM account of the relative order between the DO and the IO is flawed. Based on this conclusion, I also reject the two object positions hypothesis and plead for a flat structure view of the VP. Second, our data reveal a “long-before-short” preference, which is shown to depend on the effect of salience-enhancing factors such as definiteness, animacy and the grammatical role. I argue that while this preference is, either totally or partially, incompatible with the predictions of processing-oriented dependency-based models, it can be accounted for by production models assuming that the greater conceptual accessibility of longer constituents favors their early position in SOV languages.

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In this project, we address the task of nested noun phrase identification in English sentences, where a phrase is defined as a group of words functioning as one unit in a sentence. Prior research has extensively explored the identification of various phrases for language understanding and text generation tasks. Our aim is to tackle the novel challenge of identifying nested noun phrases within sentences. To accomplish this, we first review existing work on related topics such as partial parsing and noun phrase identification. Subsequently, we propose a novel approach based on transformer models to recursively identify nested noun phrases in sentences. We fine-tune a pre-trained uncased BERT model to detect phrase structures in a sentence and determine whether they represent noun phrases. Our recursive approach involves merging relevant segments of a sentence and assigning labels to the noun phrases at each step, facilitating the identification of nested structures. The evaluation of our model demonstrates promising results, achieving a high accuracy of up to 93.6% when considering all noun phrases in isolation and 90.9% when accounting for the predicted phrase structure of the sentence. Additionally, our model exhibits a recall rate of 83.5% and 81.2% at both levels, respectively. Overall, our model proves to be effective in identifying nested noun phrases, showcasing the potential of transformer-based models in phrase structure identification. Future research should explore further applications and enhancements of such models in this domain. / I detta projekt tar vi upp uppgiften att identifiera nästlade substantivfraser i engelska meningar, där en fras definieras som en grupp ord som fungerar som en enhet i en mening. Tidigare forskning har utförligt utforskat identifieringen av olika fraser för språkförståelse och textgenereringsuppgifter. Vårt mål är att ta itu med den nya utmaningen att identifiera nästlade substantivfraser i meningar. För att åstadkomma detta granskar vi först befintligt arbete med relaterade ämnen som partiell analys och identifiering av substantivfraser. Därefter föreslår vi en ny metod baserad på transformers-modeller för att rekursivt identifiera nästlade substantivfraser i meningar. Vi finjusterar en förtränad BERT-modell utan kapsling för att upptäcka frasstrukturer i en mening och avgöra om de representerar substantivfraser. Vårt rekursiva tillvägagångssätt innebär att sammanfoga relevanta segment av en mening och att tilldela etiketter till substantivfraserna vid varje steg, vilket underlättar identifieringen av nästlade strukturer. Utvärderingen av vår modell visar lovande resultat och uppnår en hög precision på upp till 93,6% när man tar hänsyn till alla substantivfraser isolerat och 90,9% när man tar hänsyn till meningens förutsagda frasstruktur. Dessutom uppvisar vår modell en täckning (recall) på 83,5% respektive 81,2% på båda nivåerna. Sammantaget visar vår modell sig vara effektiv för att identifiera nästlade substantivfraser, vilket visar potentialen hos transformers-modeller för identifiering av frasstruktur. Framtida forskning bör utforska ytterligare tillämpningar och förbättringar av sådana modeller på detta område.

This document deals with introduction focused on pragmatically oriented research at branch of theoretical computer science and with presentation of designed methods for chosen application topics. At this study the theoretical subject is represented by kind of generative system - multisequential grammar and application topics are chosen according to possibilities supported by multisequential grammars. In order to follow results published by Thompson (see [9]), Lindenmayer (see [26]), Mandelbrot (see [8]) and also studies published by Morneau (see [17]), which shows the relation between natural laws and human discipline - mathematics, we study the applications of multi-sequential grammars from two points of view: generative L-systems (which further includes applications of fractal geometry and biomathematics) and natural language processing (which further includes the design of proper abstract language). Some problems related to compiler construction are also mentioned.