Implementing a fragment of Modern Greek Grammar, using the Xerox Linguistics Environment (XLE)

This paper presents a computational grammar of a fragment of Modern Greek, following the principles of the Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) Parallel Grammar (ParGram) Project (PARC, 2008), a collaborative effort among researchers in industrial and academic institutions whose objective is to build wide coverage deep-parsing grammars for a wide variety of languages. The grammar is built using the Xerox Linguistics Environment (XLE) parser (PARC, 2009) and at the moment covers the syntax of basic clause and word order phenomena in Modern Greek, and the Syntax of pu-Restrictive Relative Clauses, with particular focus on the distribution of the gap/resumptive relativisation strategy. In our paper, we present a brief overview of the XLE system, and the Parallel Grammar (ParGram) initiative. We present the fragment of Modern Greek, focusing on the coverage and the main assumptions underlying the current version of the grammar. We conclude by evaluating our grammar and discussing areas in need of immediate improvement to be dealt with in future versions as well as some future development directions.