Spanish Resource Grammar version 2023

TL;DR

This paper introduces the 2023 version of the Spanish Resource Grammar, combining linguistic theory testing and NLP applications, supported by a new treebank and empirical evaluation methods.

Contribution

It presents an updated HPSG-based Spanish grammar integrated with a new treebank and a novel approach for empirical syntactic theory testing and language learning evaluation.

Findings

High coverage and low overgeneration on learner sentences

Treebanking process enhances empirical syntactic research

Grammar supports NLP applications in language learning

Abstract

We present the latest version of the Spanish Resource Grammar (SRG), a grammar of Spanish implemented in the HPSG formalism. Such grammars encode a complex set of hypotheses about syntax making them a resource for empirical testing of linguistic theory. They also encode a strict notion of grammaticality which makes them a resource for natural language processing applications in computer-assisted language learning. This version of the SRG uses the recent version of the Freeling morphological analyzer and is released along with an automatically created, manually verified treebank of 2,291 sentences. We explain the treebanking process, emphasizing how it is different from treebanking with manual annotation and how it contributes to empirically-driven development of syntactic theory. The treebanks' high level of consistency and detail makes them a resource for training high-quality semantic parsers and generally systems that benefit from precise and detailed semantics. Finally, we present the grammar's coverage and overgeneration on 100 sentences from a learner corpus, a new research line related to developing methodologies for robust empirical evaluation of hypotheses in second language acquisition.