Developing a Deep Grammar of Indonesian within the ParGram Framework: Theoretical and Implementational Challenges

Copyright 2012 by I Wayan Arka 26th Pacific Asia Conference on Language,Information and Computation pages 19–38 Developing a Deep Grammar of Indonesian within the ParGram Framework: Theoretical and Implementational Challenges I. Wayan Arka Australian National University/Udayana University wayan.arka@anu.edu.au Abstract This paper discusses theoretical and implementational challenges in developing a deep grammar of Indonesian (IndoGram) within the lexical-functional grammar (LFG)-based Parallel Grammar (ParGram) framework, using the Xerox Linguistic Environment (XLE) parser. The ParGram project involves developing and processing computational grammars in parallel to test the LFG’s theoretical claims of language universality, while at the same time testing its robustness to handle typologically quite different languages. Two relevant cases are discussed: voice-related morphosyntactic derivation and crossed-control dependency in Indonesian. It will be demonstrated that parallelism should be taken as a matter of degree, that it cannot always be maintained for good language-specific reasons and that the participation of IndoGram has also contributed to the rethinking and improvement of certain parallelism standards. 1 Introduction This paper discusses theoretical and implementational challenges to developing a deep grammar of Indonesian (IndoGram) within the Parallel Grammar (ParGram) framework. Using the Xerox Linguistic Environment (XLE) parser (Maxwell and Kaplan 1993; Crouch et al. 2007) with lexical-functional grammar (LFG) (Bresnan 1982, 2001; Dalrymple 2001) as the underlying linguistic theory, the IndoGram project joins the research and development program of broad- coverage grammars from a typologically wide range of languages. The approach (Butt et al 1999, 2002) involves developing and processing computational grammars in parallel to test the LFG’s theoretical claims of language universality, while at the same time testing its robustness to handle typologically quite different languages. While parallelism is preferred, it is demonstrated that this cannot always be strictly maintained for good language-specific reasons. It is also shown that the participation of IndoGram has contributed to the richness of linguistic phenomena to be handled within the ParGram project and to the rethinking and improvement of certain parallelism standards. Two relevant cases are discussed: voice-related morphosyntactic derivation and crossed control dependency. The paper is structured as follows. An overview of the ParGram project is first presented in section 2. Linguistic analyses of voice alternations and crossed-control constructions and their XLE implementation are given in sections 3 and 4 respectively, followed by some discussion in section 5. Conclusions are given in section 6. 2 The (Indonesian) ParGram project: an overview The Parallel Grammar (ParGram) project is an international collaborative research project for the development of large-scale computationally tractable grammars and lexicons of the world’s (major) languages. Members include the corporate research laboratories of the Palo Alto Research  Research reported in this paper was supported by the author’s ARC Discovery Grant DP DP0877595 (2009–2011). 19 Center (PARC) (USA) and Fuji Xerox (Japan), as well as Stanford University, Oxford University, Manchester University, the Universities of Stuttgart and Konstanz, (Germany), the University of Bergen (Norway), the University of Essex (UK) and Langue et dialogue (France). Current ParGram analyses (Butt et al 1999, 2002) are the result of over fifteen years of …

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