DGfS-CL Fall School 2011

Introduction to Tree Adjoining Grammar (Wolfgang Maier, Timm Lichte)

Grammar theories try to model the properties of well-formed strings (and ex negativo ill-formed strings) of natural language. They make use of grammar formalisms (GB, MG, LFG, HPSG, ...), and ideally they get implemented in NLP applications. This course will provide an in-depth introduction to Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG), a grammar formalism that features a nice trade-off between generative capacity and computational complexity. The first week highlights the formal machinery of TAG, TAG parsing and the syntax-semantics interface. In the second week, we will go into grammar engineering, first by looking into TAG analyses for several phenomena of English and German, and then by showing ways to build up and to maintain wide coverage grammars based on TAG.