Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Pere Porta <pporta7 AT gmail.com>]

(As a replying to James Christian's mail about his project on generation
grammar, which I mistakenly sent only to him and not to the list)

In this case, James, start, please.
Now, I do not know whether this can be done within b-hebrew list or rather
privately...
Dear b-hebrew Moderators, what is your mind and/or advice? Could James's
project or proposal be interesting for b-hebrew list members in a general
way?

Pere Porta
(Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain)

On 10 June 2010 09:55, James Christian <jc.bhebrew AT googlemail.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I don't how familiar everybody is with theories of generation grammar. In a
> nutshell theories of generation grammar can be summarised as follows. There
> is a set of words and rules which describe any given natural language.
> Given
> a correctly defined set of words and rules the generation grammar will
> accept all grammatically correct utterances of that language and reject ill
> formed utterances.
>
> Attempts to form a generation grammar for any given language generally
> suffer from problems of over generation and under generation. Over
> generation is when the grammar is poorly defined and, as such, accepts ill
> formed utterances as well formed utterances. Under generation is when the
> grammar rejects utterances which are known to be well formed.
>
> Testing of generation grammars consists of having two different test sets.
> One test set of well formed utterances and the other of ill formed
> utterances. The goal is that the grammar we define will accept the
> utterances known to be well formed and reject the utterances known to be
> poorly formed.
>
> If we were to extend this method to b-hebrew we already have a corpus of
> utterances we can consider to be well formed. Defining a corpus of ill
> formed phrases is a little more difficult as informants are lacking.
>
> I was toying with the idea of encouraging fans of b-hebrew to put their
> theoretical knowledge into practice by playing with building a generation
> grammar of b-hebrew using a simple linguist friendly Prolog driven
> interface. I just wanted to get a quick idea of numbers of who may be
> interested in participating in such an experiment. Please let your students
> etc. know about the prospect and get them to write to me either on or off
> list so that I can get an idea of whether it would be worth putting this
> together.
>
> James Christian
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