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The third meeting of the Prague computer science seminar

Karel Oliva

A Grammar-Checker for Czech

While an English and a Czech spelling-checker can be based on (almost) identical principles, namely on checking the presence/absence of individual words of the text in a given (albeit long) list of wordforms...

March 27, 2014

4:00pm

Auditorium E-107, FEL CTU
Karlovo nám. 13, Praha 2
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Lecture annotation

While an English and a Czech spelling-checker can be based on (almost) identical principles, namely on checking the presence/absence of individual words of the text in a given (albeit long) list of wordforms, a grammar-checker for Czech cannot employ the pattern-matching techniques often used for languages with a fixed word order, mainly due to typological differences: grammatical functions of words in a Czech sentence are expressed by morphological characteristics rather than by word order which is constrained by grammar only in exceptional cases. Thus, setting up a grammar-checker for Czech requires finding new principles and ways how to cope with the task.

In this talk, we shall be, first, concerned with general theoretical considerations of what is a “patently” ungrammatical construction of (any) language, and, second, with particular techniques for (i) defining, (ii) describing and (iii) detecting errors in a free-word-order language such as Czech.

In the final section of the talk the related but different problem of grammar-correction will be shortly mentioned, as well some theoretical impacts of the whole work.

Lecturer

Doc. RNDr. Karel Oliva, Dr.

Doc. RNDr. Karel Oliva, Dr. is an internationally recognized researcher in the area of formal syntax of natural language, taking innovative approaches resulting in commercial applications. He graduated from the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of the Charles University in Prague, held research positions at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in Sofia, at the Institute of Computational Linguistics of the University of Saarland in Saarbrücken (Germany), and at the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI) in Vienna. He has published over 85 articles in scientific journals and conference proceedings, he was a team leader and co-author of implementations of several software packages (i.a. of a Grammar-checker of Czech for Microsoft Office). He is a director of the Institute of the Czech Language ASCR. He is currently a member of teaching staff of the Faculty of Science of the J. E. Purkynie University in Usti nad Labem.

ABOUT THE PRAGUE COMPUTER SCIENCE SEMINAR

The seminar typically takes place on Thursdays at 4:15pm in lecture rooms of the Czech Technical University in Prague or the Charles University.

Its program consists of a one-hour lecture followed by a discussion. The lecture is based on an (internationally) exceptional or remarkable achievement of the lecturer, presented in a way which is comprehensible and interesting to a broad computer science community. The lectures are in English.

The seminar is organized by the organizational committee consisting of Roman Barták (Charles University, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics), Jaroslav Hlinka (Czech Academy of Sciences, Computer Science Institute), Michal Chytil, Pavel Kordík (CTU in Prague, Faculty of Information Technologies), Michal Koucký (Charles University, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics), Jan Kybic (CTU in Prague, Faculty of Electrical Engineering), Michal Pěchouček (CTU in Prague, Faculty of Electrical Engineering), Jiří Sgall (Charles University, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics), Vojtěch Svátek (University of Economics, Faculty of Informatics and Statistics), Michal Šorel (Czech Academy of Sciences, Institute of Information Theory and Automation), Tomáš Werner (CTU in Prague, Faculty of Electrical Engineering), and Filip Železný (CTU in Prague, Faculty of Electrical Engineering)

The idea to organize this seminar emerged in discussions of the representatives of several research institutes on how to avoid the undesired fragmentation of the Czech computer science community.

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Prague computer science seminar is suspended until further notice to prevent spread of the new coronavirus.