Design of head-driven phrase structure grammar for Bangla

Abstract

A considerable amount of work is being done in recent years in the arena of Computational Linguistics. However, little has been done in developing a generic computational grammar for the Bangla language that could be used for advanced language processing. Context Free Grammar (CFG) has been attempted for English, and it has been realized that this does not have the descriptive power required to model a natural language. The chief reason behind this is the large number of rules that are needed in order to capture the vast array of natural language phenomenon. Our target is to try and implement a Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) for Bangla. We would like to find out a pattern behind the various phenomenon of the language and try to capture these in the form of generalizations for the different entities of the language. We would also like to explore the underlying patterns governing the successful unification of feature structures. Eventually, we want to end up with a small scale working implementation of a Bangla HPSG that can recognize and generate a set of representative sentences from the Bangla language, accurately capturing relevant linguistic phenomenon.