Language modeling with tree-adjoining grammars

Kata Balogh and Simon Petitjean, NASSLLI 2018

Course description:

This course provides an introduction into the Tree-Adjoining Grammar (TAG) formalism (Joshi and Schabes, 1997), in particular Lexicalized Tree-Adjoining Grammar (LTAG) together with grammar implementations and tools for parsing with TAG: TuLiPA and XMG. With this course we would like to introduce TAG and show its importance in language modeling.
During the course we will discuss syntactic and semantic analyses using LTAG for natural language phenomena such as long-distance dependencies, clausal complements and the analysis of raising and control, scope ambiguity and scrambling. Next to the theoretical work two applications will be discussed in details: the Tübingen Linguistic Parsing Architecture (TuLiPA; https://github.com/spetitjean/TuLiPA-frames) and the eXtensible MetaGrammar (XMG; http://xmg.phil.hhu.de/) illustrating how those TAG analyses can be implemented, tested and used.

The TAG formalism is one of the mildly context-sensitive grammar formalisms, widely used in modeling natural languages. The adequacy of language modeling with TAG is shown by a range of grammar implementations and tools (e.g. XTAG, TuLiPA, XMG). Its importance in computational linguistics is undoubtedly shown by intrinsic and successful research both on the theoretical and on the practical side: without seeking for a full listing of recent works, see e.g. linguistic analysis using TAG in Abeillé and Rambow (2000), the syntax-semantics interface by Kallmeyer and Joshi (2003), Kallmeyer and Romero (2008), discourse processing by Webber (2004), grammar formalisms by, e.g., Shieber and Schabes (2006), wide coverage grammar implementations by the XTAG project (XTAG Research Group, 2001) and tools for parsing with TAG: TuLiPA (Parmentier et al., 2008), XMG (Crabbé et al., 2013; Kallmeyer et al., 2016).