Computational Syntactic Analysis of Hebrew Sentences

In recent years many linguistic theories have been developed which describe the ways by which a grammar for natural languages should be defined. As an outcome of these theories grammatical formalisms have been developed. Many of these formalisms were combined with parsing algorithms and were implemented as parser compilers - systems in which the grammar writer defines the rules of the language, according to the formalisms, and a parser for the language is automatically generated. The task of designing a parser for a specified natural language was now shifted to the problem of designing its grammar in certain formal ways. This paper describes the results of a project whose aim was to design a formal grammar for modern Hebrew. Such a formal grammar has never been developed before. Since most of the work on grammatical formalisms was done without regarding Hebrew (and other Semitic languages as well) we had to choose a formalism that would best fit writing a grammar for Hebrew. This part..