Evaluation of a Grammar of French Determiners.pdfVIP

Evaluation of a grammar of French determiners Éric Laporte Université Paris-Est – Laboratoire dInformatique de lInstitut Gaspard-Monge 5, bd Descartes – 77454 Marne-la-Vallée CEDEX 2 – France eric.laporte@univ-mlv.fr Abstract. Existing syntactic grammars of natural languages, even with a far from complete coverage, are complex objects. Assessments of the quality of parts of such grammars are useful for the validation of their construction. We evaluated the quality of a grammar of French determiners that takes the form of a recursive transition network. The result of the application of this local grammar gives deeper syntactic information than chunking or information available in treebanks. We performed the evaluation by comparison with a corpus independently annotated with information on determiners. We obtained 86% precision and 92% recall on text not tagged for parts of speech. 1 1. Introduction The coverage of existing syntactic-semantic grammars of natural languages is far from complete, but even so, such grammars are complex objects and their construction takes many years. Therefore, it is desirable to assess the quality of parts of a grammar and to control their evolution before it is complete. To date, partial grammars that have been submitted to evaluation are mainly grammars for named entity (NE) recognition or for chunkers. Such evaluation is motivated, in the case of NE recognition, by the existence of direct applications, namely information retrieval (IR) and information extraction (IE); in the case of chunking, it is motivated by the application to syntactic annotation of corpora; in both cases, by the application to shallow parsing. Partial gramma