In this chapter we describe a computational grammar for Basque, and the first results obtained using it in the process of automatically acquiring subcategorization information about verbs and their associated sentence elements (arguments and adjuncts).
In section 1 we describe the Basque syntax and the grammar we have developed for its treatment. The grammar is partial in the sense that it cannot recognize every sentence in real texts, but it is capable of describing the main syntactic elements, such as noun-phrases (NPs), prepositional phrases (PPs), and subordinate and simple sentences. This can be useful for several applications.
In section 2 we explain the syntactic analyzer (or parser) used to automatically acquire information on verbal subcategorization from texts. The results will later be used by a linguist or processed by statistical filters.
This work has been done by the IXA Natural Language Processing research group, centered on the application of automatic methods to the analysis of Basque.