Learning French as a Computer Scientist

May 1, 2017 Joseph Paul Cohen References 0

There are two methods from computer science that I think are relevant to help understand French.

Syntax Grammar

First having a syntax grammar similar to what is used to build compilers [1]

An interesting project for a grammar is here: http://alpage.inria.fr/frmgwiki/book/export/html/10600

Here is a parse tree for “ce tremblement de terre a fait beaucoup de dégats”

Also, here is a paper discussing “A context-free grammar of French” [2]

 

NLP Representation

In “Neural Machine Translation By Jointly Learning To Align and Translate” [3] Bahdanau introduces the concept of soft attention which provides a soft alignment between words and phrases which details what words from the source utterance influenced the target utterance.

 

 

Works Cited
  1. Java 1.8 Grammar https://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jls/se7/html/jls-18.html[↩]
  2. M. Salkoff and Morris, “A context-free grammar of French,” in Proceedings of the 8th conference on Computational linguistics -, 1980.[↩]
  3. D. Bahdanau, K. Cho, and Y. Bengio, “Neural Machine Translation By Jointly Learning To Align and Translate,” Iclr 2015, 2014.[↩]