Designing the Lexical Rules for the Parsing of ASD-STE100 Function Words in ARTEMIS from a Role and Reference Grammar Perspective

ARTEMIS (Automatically Representing Text Meaning via an Interlingua-based System), is a natural language processing device, whose ultimate aim is to be able to understand natural language fragments and arrive at their syntactic and semantic representation. Linguistically, this parser is founded on two solid linguistic theories: the Lexical Constructional Model and Role and Reference Grammar. Although the rich semantic representations and the multilingual character of Role and Reference Grammar make it suitable for natural language understanding tasks, some changes to the model have proved necessary in order to adapt it to the functioning of the ARTEMIS parser. This paper will deal with one of the major modifications that Role and Reference Grammar had to undergo in this process of adaptation, namely, the substitution of the operator projection for feature-based structures, and how this will influence the description of function words in ARTEMIS, since they are strongly responsible for the encoding of the grammatical information which in Role and Reference Grammar is included in the operators. Currently, ARTEMIS is being implemented for the controlled natural language ASD-STE100, the Aerospace and Defence Industries Association of Europe Simplified Technical English, which is an international specification for the preparation of technical documentation in a controlled language. This controlled language is used in the belief that its simplified nature makes it a good corpus to carry out a preliminary testing of the adequacy of the parser. In this line, the aim of this work is to create a catalogue of function words in ARTEMIS for ASD-STE100, and to design the lexical rules necessary to parse the simple sentence and the referential phrase in this controlled language.