CLINT: 2011/12

PATR Assignment


This assignment is worth 10% of the marks for the whole 2ECTS study unit. It corresponds to approximately 2.5 hours of student effort. You will need a working version of the PATR2 system. This can be downloaded from here.

Deadline for submission of result: Tuesday 31st January 2012. Please submit result in the form of an email to mike.rosner@um.edu.mt with subject LIN2160 Assignment. This should take the form of a series of text files (for grammar and lexicon) together with a .doc which explains answers to the questions below. If you have queries please send email to mike.rosner@um.edu.mt

For each question, you should provide the grammar, lexicon, and a few representative examples of results. In each case, grammar and lexicon should generate all and only sentences that include the said words. N.B. In the examples below, starred sentences should be rejected by the grammar.

  1. Create a grammar and lexicon that captures sentences that can be formed with the following words:
    I, you, he, she, we, they, sleep, sleeps, e.g
    I sleep, they sleep, he sleeps, he sleep*, we sleeps
  2. Add the a transitive verb (e.g. like, likes) to the lexicon and also the words me, her, him, us, them.
  3. Modify the grammar to accept I like her, she likes me and to reject her likes I*, me likes she*, she likes*, I sleeps him*
  4. Add some determiners and some adjectives to the lexicon, e.g. a, the, two, big, small, sweet, fat
  5. Add simple noun phrases to the grammar: the cat, the wolf.
  6. Add noun phrases that include one adjective The fat cat; the bad wolf.
  7. Add noun phrases that include an arbitrary number of adjectives: The fat, bad, sweet, ...., wolf.
  8. Add prepositional phases to the grammar. Note that these are composed of a preposition and a noun phrase: with the big dog.
  9. Suppose you want to handle the sentence Bill saw John with Mary? What rule would you add to the grammar? Add the rule and show the resulting parse tree
  10. Suppose you want to handle the sentence Bill saw John with a telescope. What rule would you add to the grammar? Why is this different to the previous rule? Add the rule and show the resulting parse tree
[19/12/2010]