Lab 2: Multilingual generation and translation

This lab corresponds to Chapters 5 to 9 of the Notes, but follows them only loosely. Therefore we will structure it according to the exercise sessions rather than chapters. The abstract syntax is given in the subdirectory grammars/abstract/

Session 5

Design a morphology for the main lexical types (N, A, V) with parameters and a couple of paradigms.
Test it by implementing the lexicon in the MicroLang module. You need to define lincat N,A,V,V2 as well as the paradigms in MicroResource.

To deliver: the lexicon part of files MicroGrammarX.gf and MicroResourceX.gf for your language of choice X. Follow the structure of MicroGrammarEng and MicroResourceEng when preparing these.

Session 6

Define the linearization types of main phrasal categories - the remaining categories in MicroLang.
Define the rest of the linearization rules in MicroLang.

To deliver: MicroLangX and MicroResourceX for your language of choice, with the lexicon part from Session 5 completed with syntax part.

Session 7

Add concrete UD labels.
Generate a synthetic UD treebank by using gfud.

To deliver for your language X, file MicroLangX.labels and a treebank in CoNLL format with 20 trees.

Deadline: until the end of the course.

Session 8

Try out the applications in ../python and read its README carefully.
Add a concrete syntax for your language to one of the grammars in ../python/, either Query or Draw. The simplest way to do this is first to copy the Eng grammar and then to change the words; the syntax may work well as it is. Even though it can be a bit unnatural, it should be in a wide sense natural.
Compile the grammar with gf -make Query???.gf so that your grammar gets included (the same for Draw).
Generate phrases in GF by first importing your pgf file and then issuing the command gt | l -treebank; fix your grammar if it looks too bad.
Test the corresponding Python application with your language.

To deliver: your grammar module.

Deadline: 31 May. Demo your grammars (both Micro and this one) at the last lecture of the course!

Alternative from 2022

If you want to do this instead of the current Session 8, contact Aarne first

The task is to add a language to the grammar in wikipedia/. Mode details coming soon.

More information on the task can be find in

the lecture notes: https://github.com/aarneranta/NLG-examples/blob/main/doc/gf-nlg.pdf
the slides shown on lecture 9: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1gQTI_vv6anBCaUCJujGxJZbmZBKuXPN_rRUYRgdvXio/edit?usp=sharing
the GF Summer School film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gX_y2BqJ0w0&list=PL7VkoRLnYYP6EZngakW7lNNCTjfC93uh0&index=15

A method for testing your Micro grammar

Since MicroLang is a proper part of the RGL, it can be easily implemented as an application grammar. How to do this is shown in grammar/functor/, where the implementation consists of two files:

MicroLangFunctor.gf which is a generic implementation working for all RGL languages,
MicroLangFunctorEng.gf which is a functor instantiation for English, easily reproduciple for other languages than Eng.

To use this for testing, you can take the following steps:

Build a functor instantiation for your language by copying MicroLangFunctorEng.gf and changing Eng in the file name and inside the file to your language code.
Use GF to create a testfile by random generation:

  $ echo "gr -number=1000 | l -tabtreebank" | gf english/MicroLangEng.gf functor/MicroLangFunctorEng.gf >test.tmp

Inspect the resulting file test.tmp. But you can also use Unix cut to create separate files for the two versions of the grammar and diff to compare them:

  $ cut -f2 test.tmp >test1.tmp
  $ cut -f3 test.tmp >test2.tmp
  $ diff test1.tmp test2.tmp

  52c52
  < the hot fire teachs her
  ---
  > the hot fire teaches her
  69c69
  < the man teachs the apples
  ---
  > the man teaches the apples
  122c122

As seen from the result in this case, our implementation has a wrong inflection of the verb "teach".

The Mini grammar can be tested in the same way, by building a reference implementation using the functor in functor/.