This paper discusses the development and application of a Constraint Grammar parser for the Plains Cree language. The focus of this parser is the identification of relationships between verbs and arguments. The rich morphology and non-configurational syntax of Plains Cree make it an excellent candidate for the application of a Constraint Grammar parser, which is comprised of sets of constraints with two aims: 1) the disambiguation of ambiguous word forms, and 2) the mapping of syntactic relationships between word forms on the basis of morphological features and sentential context. Syntactic modelling of verb and argument relationships in Plains Cree is demonstrated to be a straightforward process, though various semantic and pragmatic features should improve the current parser considerably. When applied to even a relatively small corpus of Plains Cree, the Constraint Grammar parser allows for the identification of common word order patterns and for relationships between word order and information structure to become apparent.
@InProceedings{SCHMIRLER18.873, author = {Katherine Schmirler and Antti Arppe and Trond Trosterud and Lene Antonsen}, title = "{Building a Constraint Grammar Parser for Plains Cree Verbs and Arguments}", booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)}, year = {2018}, month = {May 7-12, 2018}, address = {Miyazaki, Japan}, editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference chair) and Khalid Choukri and Christopher Cieri and Thierry Declerck and Sara Goggi and Koiti Hasida and Hitoshi Isahara and Bente Maegaard and Joseph Mariani and Hélène Mazo and Asuncion Moreno and Jan Odijk and Stelios Piperidis and Takenobu Tokunaga}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}, isbn = {979-10-95546-00-9}, language = {english} }
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