AL-Lisaniyyat
Volume 17, Numéro 2, Pages 45-55
2011-12-17

Similarities And Differences Between Gpsg And Hpsg Grammars Applied To The Arabic Language

Authors : Achit Abdelmadjid . Azzoune Hamid .

Abstract

The development of an efficient lingware, for any language, requires first the modeling and the formalisation of the linguistic knowledge of it. In fact, a multitude of grammatical formalisms exist, however none of them had made the unanimity of specialists of the domain. This raised the problem of choosing the most appropriate formalism for representing linguistic constructions of that language. Thus, this paper is about the discussion of the aptitude of the Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar GPSG and the Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar HPSG to represent the different analysis' levels of the arabic language. So, a comparative study is carried out between these two formalisms, in order to evaluate their capacities to represent and give account of the different analysis' levels of the arabic by taking foundations on an arabic linguistic theory. This study aims to select between these two formalisms, on the very definite criteria , the one that will be adopted to act as basis to the conception of our NLP tools for the arabic language processing. This work succeeds to the fact that HPSG as a formalism representing the different analysis' levels of the arabic is more recommended than GPSG. Thus, it was established that HPSG proposes a richer and more organized lexicon than GPSG. Also, regarding the representation of arabic syntactic constructions, HPSG offers a more elegant representation, more general and more economic in term of cost: type and number of used rules.

Keywords

Natural language processing NLP, Unification grammar, HPSG, GPSG, syntactic analysis, arabic language processing, comparative syntax