Developing a Computational Syntax of Sindhi Language in Lexical Functional Grammar Framework

Abstract

Sindhi language lacks computational linguistics resources for deep syntactic analysis. This paper presents a work on computational morphology and grammar development of Sindhi Language. An LFG (Lexical Functional Grammar) based model for Sindhi grammar is developed where morphological constructions are modeled in Xerox Lexicon Compiler (LEXC), and syntactic constructions are modeled in LFG by using Xerox Linguistic Environment (XLE). While developing morphology and syntax of Sindhi, different part of speech classes, phrase structures, tense, aspect, mood and agreement are considered wherever applicable. The developed computational grammar is tested against two different test suites. First test suite contains 617 handcrafted sentences in 10 different test files containing sentences with different syntactic features. Second test suite contains real time corpus of two text books of Sindhi class one with 258 sentences. Results show 98.05% and 96.5% parsing percentage of test suite 1 and test suite 2 respectively