Knowledge integration in a robust and efficient morpho-syntactic analyzer for French

Knowledge integration in a robust and efficient morpho-syntactic analyzer for Frencht Louisette Emirkanian D6p. de linguistique ABSTRACT Lorne H. Bouchard D6p. de math6matiques et d'infonnatique Universit6 du Qu6bec h MontrEal C.P. 8888, Succursale "A" Montr6al, QC Canada H3C 3P8 R15320 @ UQAM. BITNET We present a morpho-syntactic analyzer for French which is capable of automatically detecting and of correcting (automatically or with user help) spelling mistakes, agreement errors and certain frequently encountered syntactic errors. Emphasizing the specific language knowledge that is used, we describe the major sub- tasks of this analyzer: word categorization by dictionary look-up and spelling correction, construction of a parse tree or of a forest of parse trees, correction of syntactic and morphological errors by processing the parse tree. The spelling corrector module is designed to help correct the spelling mistakes of a French novice, as opposed to those of an experienced typist. The syntax analysis module is driven by an empirical grammar for French and is based on the work of Tomita. The presentation is based on the design and implementation of a prototype of the system which is written in Lisp for the Macintosh computer. 1. INTRODUCTION Our goal is to construct a morpho-syntactic analyzer for French which is capable of automatically detecting and of correcting (automatically or with help from the user) spelling mistakes, agreement errors and the most important syntax errors. This system could be used to analyze word processor output, for example. Since our main goal is to implement a robust and efficient analyzer for French, we have designed a system which can detect errors as opposed to one which can only process well-formed input. A number of systems for English text analysis have been developed. The Writer's Workbench/Frase 1983/is a collection of tools developed at AT&T's Bell Laboratories: the two most important ones address proof reading and style analysis. The EPISTLE project /Miller, Heidorn & Jensen 1981/is a vast project undertaken at IBM's Thomas J. Watson research laboratory, the long term goal of which is to develop a system which not only supports writing, but also text understanding. WANDAH/Friedman 1984/, a system that was developed at UCLA, comprises three sub-systems: a word processor designed to support interactive composition, tools to assist composition and tools to help in the editing and the revising phases. These systems are difficult to adapt to French since they are based on knowledgg which is specific to English. Furthermore, in these systems the gnowledge is rarely represented explicitly: indeed, the knowledge/has most often been "compiled" for reasons of efficiencyj Thus, these systems cannot easily reason about the knowledge they have. /- The ~ovel feature of our system is that it is based on an integration at different levels of the knowledge of French. This knowledge is represented explicitly in the system and the system keeps track of the decisions it has made, which will allow it not only to justify its decisions but also to reason about its reasoning. The main problem is in the integration of …

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