Joshua Johanson
Lab 4

For the most part, the modules page was pretty easy to fill out.  Sentential negation is done with an adverb that is an independent modifier that appears to the left of a verb phrase.  Coordination is monosyndeton, according to Scott's definition.  It is marked on nouns, noun phrases, verb phrases and sentences by the word "e" that comes before the final coordinand, (not after each coordinand.  That confused me at first.)  Yes-No questions are only marked with intonation and there is no case marking adpositions.

Italian is SVO.  The word order is a bit more loose, but SVO is the primary order.  The other orders will be exceptions.

My starter grammar was not able to parse any sentences.  It was able to parse some sentences that I constructed for it, but none that were actually in the test suite.  I was a bit confused on how to handle inflections, but you explained that all I needed to do was to not strip out the hyphen and use the hyphen to separate the morphemes.  I also had problems when itsdb converted my formatting from one type of encoding to another.  Even with the changes, my parser was not able to parse any sentences.  It was only able to identify 0.41% of the words.   

I then added the most frequent forms of all the verbs, determiners and nouns.  I was able to parse 4 sentences (3 of which were grammatical.)  I was only able to identify 3.6% of the words.  Most of my words are pronouns or verbs with an uncommon inflection.  I also had many sentences that had an irregular word order, dropped the subject, or had adjectives, prepositional phrases or auxiliaries.

I was able to fix many errors by looking at the structure.  I saw I had misspelled some words, had marked some verbs as transitive instead of intransitive, just plain forgot some words and had other minor errors.  

After I fixed everything, it generated the structures I expected.  The ungrammatical sentence that I parsed had an agreement error, which I knew the grammar wouldn't be able to parse.

I think the biggest improvement in coverage will be the addition of pronouns and pro-dropping, with the the addition of lexical rules a close second.  I tried to keep it consistently simple when I wrote my test suite, but Italian without pro-dropping sounds very stuffy and overly verbose.  I could have complete noun phrases instead of pronouns, but I figured that we would add pronouns soon enough.  I needed pronouns for many of the sentences that showed variation in word order and to show case.  I was actually surprised pronouns weren't in the initial matrix. Many of those noun phrase would be bare noun phrases anyhow.  

Some sentences that I could simplify are sentences like "This is a book" or "You are wise," but I still want to be able to handle them in the long run.