A computational grammar of Singlish using HPSG

Abstract

In this thesis, I show various computational steps carried out to create a branch Singlish grammar from the English Resource Grammar (ERG). The thesis begins with background information on Singlish and Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) which the analyses are based on. A bulk of this paper (Chapters 2, 3 and 4) describes different phenomena in Singlish and the ways in which they are added into the grammar. Certain general features, sentence final particles and functions of the word one in Singlish make up the features described. Towards the end, I present a comparison of parsing results of the newly created Singlish grammar and the standard English grammar of ERG on a collection of Singlish text. The chapter on parsing also shows the raw parsing results and the evaluation of a small subset of standard English and Singlish parses with respect to a set of gold trees. At the end of each chapter, I include chapter remarks that talk about possible future directions with respect to the chapter’s focus.