A Generative Grammar Approach For The Morphologic And Morphosyntactic Analysis Of Italian

A morphologic and morphosyntactic analyzer for the Italian language has been implemented in VM/Prolog |3| at the IBM Rome Scientific Center as part of a project on text understanding.Aim of this project is the development of a prototype which analyzes short narrative texts (press agency news) and gives a formal representation of their "meaning" as a set of first order logic expressions. Question answering features are also provided.The morphologic analyzer processes every word by means of a context free grammar, in order to obtain its morphologic and syntactic characteristics.It also performs a morphosyntactic analysis to recognize fixed and variable sequences of words such as idioms, date expressions, compound tenses of verbs and comparative and superlative forms of adjectives.The lexicon is stored in a relational data base under the control of SQL/DS [2], while the endings of the grammar are stored in the workspace as Prolog facts.A friendly interface written in GDDM [1] allows the user to introduce on line the missing lemmata, in order to directly update the dictionary.