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 131 at the IBM Romc 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 cxpressi{~ns, compound tenses of verbs and comparative and superlative form~ of adjectives. The lexicon is stored in a relational data base under thc control of SQL/DS [2], while the endings of the grammar are stored in thc workspace as Proiog facts. A friendly interface written in GDDM [11 allows the uscr to introduce on line the missing lemmata, in order to directly ulxlatc thc dictionary.