Implementation and Evaluation of an LFG-based Parser for Wolof

Cheikh M. Bamba Dione


Abstract
This paper reports on a parsing system for Wolof based on the LFG formalism. The parser covers core constructions of Wolof, including noun classes, cleft, copula, causative and applicative sentences. It also deals with several types of coordination, including same constituent coordination, asymmetric and asyndetic coordination. The system uses a cascade of finite-state transducers for word tokenization and morphological analysis as well as various lexicons. In addition, robust parsing techniques, including fragmenting and skimming, are used to optimize grammar coverage. Parsing coverage is evaluated by running test-suites of naturally occurring Wolof sentences through the parser. The evaluation of parsing coverage reveals that 72.72% of the test sentences receive full parses; 27.27% receive partial parses. To measure accuracy, the parsed sentences are disambiguated manually using an incremental parsebanking approach based on discriminants. The evaluation of parsing quality reveals that the parser achieves 67.2% recall, 92.8% precision and an f-score of 77.9%.
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.631
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
5128–5136
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.631
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Cheikh M. Bamba Dione. 2020. Implementation and Evaluation of an LFG-based Parser for Wolof. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 5128–5136, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Implementation and Evaluation of an LFG-based Parser for Wolof (Dione, LREC 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.631.pdf