Automatic Extraction of Typological Linguistic Features from Descriptive Grammars.

The present paper describes experiments on automatically extracting typological linguistic features of natural languages from traditional written descriptive grammars. The feature-extraction task has high potential value in typological, genealogical, historical, and other related areas of linguistics that make use of databases of structural features of languages. Until now, extraction of such features from grammars has been done manually, which is highly time and labor consuming and becomes prohibitive when extended to the thousands of languages for which linguistic descriptions are available. The system we describe here starts from semantically parsed text over which a set of rules are applied in order to extract feature values. We evaluate the system's performance on the manually curated Grambank database as the gold standard and report the first measures of precision and recall for this problem.