Getting Started with the Grammar Matrix

This page provides pointers for getting started with the Grammar Matrix customization system.

Where is the Matrix?

The customization system can be accessed from the following web page:

http://matrix.delph-in.net/customize/matrix.cgi

Where can I find instructions on filling out the questionnaire?

Most of the libraries in the Grammar Matrix have at least some documentation on the MatrixDoc pages.

Note that filling out the questionnaire is an iterative process. To get as much as possible out of the customization system, you should develop a test suite illustrating the phenomena covered by the questionnaire in the language you are modeling and then develop different versions of your ‘choices’ file (the file containing your answers to the questionnaire), iteratively testing the resulting grammar on your test suite. Furthermore, it is always wise to start small and extend incrementally. Even with morphologically complex languages, your very first version of your grammar should have a full-form lexicon. Once you see that working (and parsing a few sentences), you can go back and do the morphology. If you have a lot of morphological rules to add, for example, try one or two and see how they work before fleshing out full paradigms.

In addition, EmilyBender’s course pages for Ling567 at UW may be helpful. These course pages are updated each time the course is taught (roughly annually), but typically follow the same schedule:

• Lab 1 is an exercise about getting familiar with the LKB and doesn’t really relate to the Matrix.
• Labs 2-4 walk students through creating test suites on the one hand and filling out the customization system on the other.
• Labs 5-8 are about extending the grammars through tdl editing.

What other software do I need?

You’ll want the LKB (LkbTop) or ace (AceTop), a text editor (preferably emacs), and [incr tsdb()]. Typically, the easiest way to get set up is with the Ubuntu+LKB Virtual Box appliance, maintained at UW.

How about papers I can read?

The key references for the Grammar Matrix are the following two papers:

• Zamaraeva, Olga, Chris Curtis, Guy Emerson, Antske Fokkens, Michael Wayne Goodman, Kristen Howell, T.J. Trimble, and Emily M. Bender. 2022. 20 years of the Grammar Matrix: cross-linguistic hypothesis testing of increasingly complex interactions. Journal of Language Modeling 10(1) Special Section on the Interaction between Formal and Computational Linguistics. p.49-137.
• Bender, Emily M., Scott Drellishak, Antske Fokkens, Laurie Poulson, and Safiyyah Saleem. 2010. Grammar Customization. Research on Language and Computation 8(1):23-72. [.bib] [Pre-print available on request.]
• Bender, Emily M., Dan Flickinger and Stephan Oepen. 2002. The Grammar Matrix: An Open-Source Starter-Kit for the Rapid Development of Cross-Linguistically Consistent Broad-Coverage Precision Grammars. Carroll, John, Nelleke Oostdijk, and Richard Sutcliffe, eds. Proceedings of the Workshop on Grammar Engineering and Evaluation at the 19th International Conference on Computational Linguistics. Taipei, Taiwan. pp. 8-14.

A complete list of publications from the Grammar Matrix project is available on the project home page.

What else might be helpful?

Once you are working with tdl editing, the GrammarEngineeringFaq pages may be helpful. The feature geometry cheat sheets at the bottom of GeFaqFeatureGeometry are particularly popular.

Where can I send questions?

Please check out the DELPH-IN QA Discourse site and post questions there.

Last update: 2023-06-30 by emilymbender [edit]