The Parsing System Palavras: Automatic Grammatical Analysis of Portuguese in a Constraint Grammar Framework

This reference is the result of a dissertation project carried out at the University of Aarhus between 1994 and 1999, and describes a Progressive Level Parser ( Palavras ) and a Dependency Grammar for Portuguese, both based on the Constraint Grammar paradigm and embedded in extensive corpus research. The text provides a thorough discussion of relevant issues in general and computational linguistics, while at the same time offering an empirically motivated view on Portuguese grammar. Both morphology, syntax and semantics are treated, as well as a number of practical applications, covering corpus annotation, grammar teaching and machine translation. All chapters are embroidered with examples, graphics and statistics, and a gentle progression of topics makes the book accessible to a wide range of linguistically interested readers.