XMG: eXtensible MetaGrammar

Abstract

In this article, we introduce eXtensible MetaGrammar (XMG), a framework for specifying tree-based grammars such as Feature-Based Lexicalized Tree-Adjoining Grammars (FB-LTAG) and Interaction Grammars (IG). We argue that XMG displays three features that facilitate both grammar writing and a fast prototyping of tree-based grammars. Firstly, XMG is fully declarative. For instance, it permits a declarative treatment of diathesis that markedly departs from the procedural lexical rules often used to specify tree-based grammars. Secondly, the XMG language has a high notational expressivity in that it supports multiple linguistic dimensions, inheritance, and a sophisticated treatment of identifiers. Thirdly, XMG is extensible in that its computational architecture facilitates the extension to other linguistic formalisms. We explain how this architecture naturally supports the design of three linguistic formalisms, namely, FB-LTAG, IG, and Multi-Component Tree-Adjoining Grammar (MC-TAG). We further show how it permits a straightforward integration of additional mechanisms such as linguistic and formal principles. To further illustrate the declarativity, notational expressivity, and extensibility of XMG, we describe the methodology used to specify an FB-LTAG for French augmented with aComputational Linguistics Volume 39, Number 3 unification-based compositional semantics. This illustrates both how XMG facilitates the modeling of the tree fragment hierarchies required to specify tree-based grammars and of a syntax/semantics interface between semantic representations and syntactic trees. Finally, we briefly report on several grammars for French, English, and German that were implemented using XMG and compare XMG with other existing grammar specification frameworks for tree-based grammars.

A syntax-semantics interface for Tree-Adjoining Grammars through Abstract Categorial Grammars

“…interpretation builds the expected semantics with the required scope inversions. In terms of lexical semantics, the analysis and the account we propose are very close to the one proposed in synchronous TAG (Nesson 2009, p. 142 (Candito 1996(Candito , 1999Xia 2001;Xia et al 2005;Crabbé et al 2013). But in this article, we give the terms corresponding to the actual elementary trees that would be generated.…”

Modeling the Induced Action Alternation and the Caused-Motion Construction with Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG) and Semantic Frames

“…We present an XMG-2 model that can be used to derive the available readings of sentences like those discussed above. XMG (eXtensible MetaGrammar, Crabbé et al 2013) is a system for designing metagrammars that can be compiled into natural-language grammars. We use XMG-2 (Petitjean et al, 2016) to create a TAG fragment (Tree Adjoining Grammar, Joshi and Schabes 1997) that encodes the syntax and semantics of the sentence types discussed here.…”

Multiword expressions and lexicalism: the view from LFG

“…a set of expressions spelling out additional linguistic information via the correspondence architecture. In TAG-LFG, a lexical entry is instead a triple ( W , T, F ), consisting of a list of word forms, a tree, provided by some metagrammar (Crabbé et al, 2013), and a functional description. A simple example for a non-decomposable idiom is given in down).…”