AF-PAK LEARN Omaha
May 17, 2010
Corey Miller (cmiller@casl.umd.edu), Anne David,
Michael Maxwell, Alina Twist, Claudia Brugman,
Evelyn Browne, Melissa Fox, Michael Marlo, Paul
Rodrigues and Tristan Purvis
LANGUAGE RESEARCH IN SERVICE TO THE NATION

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• Pashto is an indispensable Afghan language critical to our nation’s security
• Pashto is difficult for English speakers
• Updated, comprehensive, learner-oriented
Pashto materials are needed
– Grammar
– Easy-access dictionary
LANGUAGE RESEARCH IN SERVICE TO THE NATION

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• Ergativity
• Up to four cases: direct, oblique, ablative, and vocative
• Multiple noun and adjective declension classes
• Variety of adpositions: prepositions, postpositions, and circumpositions
• Retroflex consonants
• Variety of verbal structures
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Fieldwork
Descriptive
Grammar
Formal
Grammar
Dictionary
Parser enables easy access to dictionary
Parser
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• Identified native speakers of Pashto from
Afghanistan and Pakistan living in the US
– Peshawar, Quetta, Pakistan
– Kabul, Kandahar, Afghanistan
• Create and run elicitation guides highlighting range of grammatical features
• Review all paradigms and example sentences, note dialect variation
• Digitally record all sessions
LANGUAGE RESEARCH IN SERVICE TO THE NATION

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Motivation for descriptive grammar
• Existing materials suffer from liabilities
– dated
– cover single dialect
• Tegey and Robson 1996: Kabul
• Penzl 1955: Kandahar
• Shafeev 1964: Kandahar
– lack Pashto script (T&R has it)
LANGUAGE RESEARCH IN SERVICE TO THE NATION

• Contemporary data and presentation
• Use of Pashto script and transcription throughout
• Cover dialect variation wherever it applies
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• Pashto language, orthography, phonology
• Adpositions
• Pronouns
• Nouns
• Adjectives
• Verbs
• Dialectology
• Miscellaneous
LANGUAGE RESEARCH IN SERVICE TO THE NATION

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LANGUAGE RESEARCH IN SERVICE TO THE NATION

Pronoun paradigm: incorporation of dialect information
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Formal grammar of inflectional affix
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LANGUAGE RESEARCH IN SERVICE TO THE NATION

Formal grammar of phonological rule
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• Inputs
– Formal grammar
– Dictionary (Lexicon)
• Output capability
– Analysis: given an inflected form, produce possible headwords
– Generation: given a headword, produce possible inflected forms
LANGUAGE RESEARCH IN SERVICE TO THE NATION

• Analysis capability enables dictionary lookup of inflected forms
• Generation has pedagogical uses including self-testing
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How morphological analysis aids lookup
• Inflected forms may differ substantially from citation forms
Pashto
ملو
ملتشيو
Transcription wə́ləm wiʃtə́ləm
Translation
I am shooting
I was shooting
• Experts can work around this problem, but non-experts often can ’t
LANGUAGE RESEARCH IN SERVICE TO THE NATION

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The parser maps inflected forms to citation forms (headwords)
What does this
What does this mean?
ملو
Grammatical info: first person singular present imperfective
Citation form: لتشيو
لتشيو
[ wishtə́l]
(verb) to shoot
LANGUAGE RESEARCH IN SERVICE TO THE NATION

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• Updated descriptive grammar based on fieldwork
• Formal grammar and lexicon feed parser
• Parser enables simplified dictionary lookup
• Faster, more informed processing of Pashto
LANGUAGE RESEARCH IN SERVICE TO THE NATION

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• Updated descriptive grammar based on fieldwork
• Formal grammar and lexicon feed parser
• Parser enables simplified dictionary lookup
 Faster, more informed processing of
Pashto
LANGUAGE RESEARCH IN SERVICE TO THE NATION

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• David, Anne and Michael Maxwell. 2008. Joint grammar development by linguists and computer scientists. Workshop on NLP for Less Privileged
Languages, Third International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, Hyderabad,
India.
• Maxwell, Michael and Anne David. 2008.
Interoperable Grammars. First International
Conference on Global Interoperability for
Language Resources, Hong Kong.
• Maxwell, Michael. 2010. Standardizaton as a means to Sustainability. LREC (to appear).
LANGUAGE RESEARCH IN SERVICE TO THE NATION

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• Penzl, Herbert. 1955. A Grammar of Pashto.
Washington, DC: American Council of
Learned Societies.
• Tegey, Habibullah and Barbara Robson.
1996. A Reference Grammar of Pashto.
Washington, DC: Center for Applied
Linguistics.
• Shafeev, D. A. 1964. A Short Grammatical
Outline of Pashto. International Journal of
American Linguistics 30.
LANGUAGE RESEARCH IN SERVICE TO THE NATION