1(a) What is a grammar?

Grammar is the set of structural rules used for the composition of words, phrase
s, clauses and sentences in a language.
(b) Using examples of English sentences and their translations in your mother to
ngue, demonstrate that the grammars of the two languages
may be quite similar in some respects and very different in some other respects.
2
(a) Define morphology
Morphology is the study of the internal structure of words.
What is a morpheme?
A morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit of a word.
Distinguish between a free morpheme and a bound morpheme
A free morpheme can occur on its own in a word while a bound morpheme depends on
some other morphemes to occur in a word.
Example: in the word going , go and ing are meaningful units and hence morphemes. T
he morpheme go can occur on its own, but the morpheme
ing always requires a verb to hang on to.
What is a recurrent partial
A recurrent partial is a part of a word (morpheme) that occurs relatively freque
ntly in the vocabulary of language.
3
a) Explain what is meant by Natural Language Processing?
b) Explain the role of each of the following in Natural Language Processing:
syntax
semantics
pragmatics
What is BNF? Why is it used to describe grammars?
Given the nonterminal symbols
NounPhrase ? Noun
| Article Noun
| Adjective Noun
| Article Adjective Noun
VerbPhrase ? Verb
| Verb NounPhrase
| Adverb Verb NounPhrase
Generate two sentences from the rules to form a lexicon of the language. The wor
ds (lexicon) which parts of speech should derive the production
rule (terminal symbols: Noun, Verb, Article and Adjective
Explain three (3) Noam Chomsky hierarchy of grammar and give examples of sentenc
es allowed?
How are transition networks used to represent a grammar?
Distinguish between Top-Down and Bottom-Up parsing, giving at least two examples
of each.
Discuss the following with examples
Semantic Analysis
Syntactic ambiguity
Distinguish between natural language and formal language
Explain the difficulties involved in machine translation.