XPAR (Language Diversity and Parallel Grammars) has been a project at the LaMoRe research group. The pilot phase, supported by L. Meltzers Høyskolefond, ran from April 1, 2009 until March 31, 2010. Some of the results are taken up in the INESS project.
The goal of XPAR has been to determine to what extent the development of parallel deep grammars for typologically diverse languages may support the automatic derivation of high-quality parallel treebanks for those languages. These treebanks could in turn be suitable for a deeper theoretical understanding of the ways in which syntactic functions, semantic roles and translation are interrelated.
A methodology and tool for parallel treebanking has been developed, including automatic word and phrase alignment and search. An experimental parallel treebank was built for Norwegian, Georgian, and Tigrinya to test this methodology. The method and tool were described in a paper (see Results).
The project results could be further developed and applied in linguistic research towards a better understanding of the relationship between syntactic functions and argument structure by the automatic derivation of semantic roles from translational correspondences between syntactic arguments.
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