Processing Swedish sentences : a unification-based grammar and some applications
Björn Gambäck · 1997
A unification-based grammar is a type of language description well suited for the implementation on a computer. As many other contemporary grammar theories, almost all the unification-based ones advocate the usage of a set of phrase structure rules to describe how acceptable utterances are formed in a particular language. The constituents of the rules are annotated with a set of features. Rules may be applied to phrases only if the structure of a rule and a phrase match each other, or in other words, if they unify. That is, if their features only take on values of the same types and within the same ranges. The thesis describes the implementation of a large-scale unification-based grammar for Swedish. Part of the text is devoted to the more theoretical and linguistic sides, discussing all the different grammar rules, while concentrating the main effort on the treatment of verb phrases. Another part addresses a range of different application areas in which a language processing system eq...