Constraint Grammar

Constraint Grammar is a tool that can be used to POS-tag ambiguous text. There are free constraint grammars developed outside the Apertium project for: Norwegian (the Oslo-Bergen tagger), Sámi languages (from Giellatekno) and Faroese (also from Giellatekno).

Terminology

See also: Apertium stream format

• cohort — a surface form of a word, along with its analyses (possible lexical units), an ambiguous lexical unit.

Apertium equivalent: ^words/word<n><pl>/word<vblex><pres><p3><sg>$

• baseform — the lemma of a word.
• reading — a single analysis of a word.

Apertium equivalent: ^word<n><pl>$

• wordform — a surface form of a word.

Note on parenthesis

The use of parentheses to distinguish between tags and lists/sets seems to be the main confusing point for people learning CG. If we have the morphological tags tag1 and tag2, then we can have rules like this:

LIST set1 = tag1 ;
LIST set2 = (tag1 tag2) ; # matches a word with both tag1 and tag2
LIST set3 = tag1 tag2 ;   # matches a word with tag1 or tag2
LIST word = "hello" ;

SELECT:1a (tag1) (1 word) ;
SELECT:1b  set1  (1 word) ;   # equivalent to 1a

SELECT:2a (tag1 tag2) (1 word) ;
SELECT:2b  set2       (1 word) ;   # equivalent to 2a

SELECT:3a tag1 (1 word) ;
SELECT:3b tag2 (1 word) ;
SELECT:3c set3 (1 word) ;   # equivalent to 3a and 3b combined

SELECT:1c  set1  (1 ("hello")) ; # equivalent to 1a (or 1b)

Languages using CG in Apertium

• Breton
• Welsh
• Norwegian Nynorsk and Norwegian Bokmål
• Sámi languages
• Irish Gaelic

See also

• Apertium and Constraint Grammar -- installation and use
• Introduksjon til føringsgrammatikk -- a HOWTO, in Norwegian bokmål

External links

• VISL CG-3 Development Information + documentation and downloads
• Basic Tutorial for VISL CG-3
• cg-mode for emacs, gives basic syntax highlighting and indentation
• Kevin Donnelly's CG tutorial
• Hulden M, Francom J (2012) Boosting Statistical Tagger Accuracy with Simple Rule-Based Grammars, Proc. LREC 2012, p. 2114-2117 shows how 20 hours (very little time!) writing disambiguation rules gives substantial improvements.