Parsing Turkish with the Lexical Functional Grammar Formalism

Abstract

This paper describes our work on parsing Turkish using the lexical-functional grammar formalism. This work represents the first significant effort for parsing Turkish. Our implementation is based on Tomita's parser developed at Carnegie-Mellon University Center for Machine Translation. The grammar covers a substantial subset of Turkish including simple and complex sentences, and deals with a reasonable amount of word order freeness. The complex agglutinative morphology of Turkish lexical structures is handled using a separate two-level morphological analyzer. After a discussion of key relevant issues regarding Turkish grammar, we discuss aspects of our system and present results from our implementation. Our initial results suggest that our system can parse about 82\% of the sentences directly and almost all the remaining with very minor pre-editing.