Computational and Mathematical Linguistics Project

Participants: Jesse Frohlich and Andrew Wilson

Ideas

• Build a syntax parser for the constructed language toki pona. Given a sentence in toki pona, check for

  • grammaticality (i.e. whether a valid syntax tree exists)
  • ambiguity (i.e. whether multiple such trees exist)

• Find other languages which can be easily parsed

  • Esperanto
  • Ithkuil
  • Lojban

• Syntactic ambiguity

  • Which combinations of syntactic features result in a large number of possible syntax trees? I.e. which languages allow for the most syntactic puns (as opposed to morphological puns).

• *Density questions.

  • Can you distinguish poetry from prose from nonsense by analyzing compressibility of a passage of text?

Languages

• Haskell (functional, pretty)
• Python (easy-to-code, good for prototyping)
• Other
  • Rust (functional and procedural, safe)
  • Ruby (OOL)
  • Go

Plan

• Talk to Matilde about the project
• Look into common algorithms for building parse trees
  • SWI-Prolog parser
  • C# parser
• Read some papers
  • University of Hawaii
• Learn some Haskell
• Learn some toki pona
• Learn some linguistics
  • Is Chompsky normal form computationally desirable?
    • "AdvP la Clause" vs "Clause la AdvP"

TODO

• en
• anu
• seme
• la
• mu
• o

Sources

• Dictionary
• Non CNF CYK algorithm Goals for 2019-03-21
• Finish the lexer
  • tpLex :: String -> [Lexeme]
• Discuss the CFG