Introduction

PorGram is an open source computational grammar for Portuguese in the HPSG formalism. It is work in progress. The long term goal is a large coverage grammar for deep syntactic and semantic parsing of unrestricted text.

The grammar is being developed by Leonel Figueiredo de Alencar (@leoalenc), a computational linguist and Professor at the Federal University of Ceará, in collaboration with Alexandre Rademaker (@arademaker), a computer scientist with IBM Research Lab in Rio de Janeiro and Professor at the School of Applied Mathematics of the Getúlio Vargas Foundation (EMAp/FGV).

This effort is part of the research activities of the former as a Visiting Professor at EMAp/FGV. In this first stage of its development, PorGram is being implememnted with the LinGO Grammar Matrix (Bender, Flickinger and Oepen 2002; Bender et al. 2010):

https://matrix.ling.washington.edu/index.html

This system generates an HPSG grammar from specifications provided by the user in a HTML questionnaire. This questionnaire covers a wide range of grammatical phenomena in a large variety of languages. It does not cover, however, the full range of syntactic and morphological properties that need to be encoded in a large coverage grammar. Therefore, additional or alternative specifications will be manually included in the TDL source code generated by the LinGO Grammar Matrix. As an open source project, we invite the community to contribute with the grammar development.

License

See LICENSE

References

• Bender, Emily M., Dan Flickinger and Stephan Oepen. 2002. The Grammar Matrix: An Open-Source Starter-Kit for the Rapid Development of Cross-Linguistically Consistent Broad-Coverage Precision Grammars. Carroll, John, Nelleke Oostdijk, and Richard Sutcliffe, eds. Proceedings of the Workshop on Grammar Engineering and Evaluation at the 19th International Conference on Computational Linguistics. Taipei, Taiwan. pp. 8-14.
• Bender, Emily M., Scott Drellishak, Antske Fokkens, Laurie Poulson and Safiyyah Saleem. 2010. Grammar Customization. Research on Language and Computation 8(1):23-72.