Corpora: BOOK

[María Paula Santalla del Río]

Title: A Formal Grammar of Spanish for Phrase-level Analysis
Applied to Information Retrieval

Publication year: 2002

Publisher: Universidade de Santiago de Compostela

Book URL: http://www.usc.es/spubl/lm14.html

Author: M.ª Paula Santalla del Río

ABSTRACT:

M.ª Paula Santalla del Río, A Formal Grammar of Spanish for
Phrase-level Analysis Applied to Information Retrieval,
Lalia, Series Maior, 14, Universidade de Santiago de
Compostela, Santiago de Compostela, 2002.

Linguistic fields: formal grammar and syntax
Subject language: Spanish
Written in: English

This book describes in detail the formal grammar of Spanish
developed, on the one hand, in the frame of the DoRo project
(Esprit 22716), a research project in the area of
Information Retrieval, specifically of Document Routing
applications. On the other hand, the proposed grammar is
conditioned by the analysis and the further automatic
development of BDS (Base de Datos Sintácticos-Syntatic
Database: www.bds.usc.es), which, developed in the
University of Santiago and especially organized to show
data about verb government, contains the manual analysis of
160.000 clauses of current Spanish. Because of the first
aim, this is a grammar for the identification of phrases,
because of the second one, the grammar aims at identifying
phrases to the extent that these do match linguistic
sequences that fill syntactic functional slots at
clause-level analysis. This duplicity of objectives is
accounted for especially in Chapter 4 of the book, where
we describe the necessary adjustments (required by either
the simpler objective of identifying sequences of phrases or
the, more complex, objective of integrating this
identification in a clause-level grammar) in the formal
description of the structures dealt with in previous
chapters.

The formalism used in the description is AGFL (Affix
Grammars over Finite Lattices, www.cs.kun.nl/agfl) and the
descriptive model underlying the description is based on
constitutive and functional principles. After the first
chapter of introduction, Chapter 2 is devoted to the verb
phrase, intended as any combination of verb forms,
auxiliaries or main verbs, and clitic pronouns that can
express a combination of voice, impersonality and argument
subcategorization (prepositional requirements included)
functional in a real context and obtained from the
possibilities that for such combinations shows the verb in
the lexical level. Chapter 3 is subsequently devoted to the
noun phrase, the pronoun phrase, the adverb phrase, the
adjective phrase and the extension of the first two of them
by means of determiners. It deals as well with
nominalizations, clause constituents of clauses (infinitive
clauses, that-clauses, etc.) and prepositional phrases.
Chapter 4, as we already pointed out above in this message,
deals with the necessary adjustments made in the formal
structures described before ir order to integrate the
phrase-level grammar in different environments of
application, these adjustments concern primarily the
treatment of ambiguity in the grammar.

The book can be ordered from:

Servicio de Publicacións e Intercambio Científico
Campus universitario sur / E-15782 Santiago de Compostela
Phone: +34 981 593500 / Fax: +34 981 593963
e-mail: spublic at usc.es
URL: www.usc.es/spubl

Paperback: ISBN 84-8121-851-0, pages: 441, price:
Spain: 25.24 Euros (VAT included)
Foreign countries: 24.27 Euros (+ 3.85)
COMMENT: 15% off for institutions