@inbook {6067, title = {Is there a canonical order in Persian ditransitive constructions? Corpus based and experimental studies}, booktitle = {Ditransitive constructions in a cross-linguistic perspective}, year = {2019}, publisher = {Reichert}, organization = {Reichert}, edition = {Agnes Korn, Andrej Malchukov, Carina Jahani}, address = {Wiesbaden}, author = {Pegah Faghiri and Samvelian, Pollet and Barbara Hemforth} } @conference {4711, title = {Length effects in an OV language with Differential Object Marking and mixed head direction}, year = {2016}, month = {03/2016}, abstract = {

Length effects in an OV language with Differential Object Marking and mixed head direction
Pegah Faghiri (Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3), Barbara Hemforth (CNRS/Paris-Diderot) \& Pollet Samvelian (Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3)

pegah.faghiri@univ-paris3.fr
The \“long-before-short\” (LbS) preference observed in SOV languages, e.g. Japanese, Persian

and Basque, challenges the universality of availability-based theories of word order preferences supported by incremental models of speech production, put forward to account for the \“end-weight\” preference observed namely in German and English. Based on data from Japanese, Yamashita \& Chang (2001) propose a unified but language-specific accessibility-based account for both preferences. Their rationale is that 1) longer constituents are lexically richer and hence more salient than shorter ones, while being more costly to process and plan; 2) language-specific properties may modulate the sensitivity of a production system to conceptual vs. formal factors. With respect to word order, Japanese speakers focus more on conveying meaning than on sequencing forms, contrary to e.g. English speakers, given that Japanese has fewer syntactic constrains (e.g. flexible word order \& null pronouns) and that the shift does not occur in the postverbal domain where the verb is shown to exert strong influence.

Recent studies Japanese (Tanaka et al. 2011) and Basque (Ros et al. 2015) reject a conceptual account of LbS in favor of Hawkins\’ dependency-based distance-minimizing model (1994, 2004), which predicts mirror-image preferences in (strictly) VO and OV languages. Contributing to this discussion, we provide data on Persian, another SOV language with flexible word order and null pronouns, but head-initial in NP, PP and CP. Persian has verbal agreement with subject and Differential Object Marking (realized by =r ) triggered by definiteness.

Previous corpus and experimental studies on the relative order between the DO and the IO in the preverbal domain (Faghiri \& Samvelian 2014, Faghiri et al. 2014) have found a clear LbS preference, not predicted by Hawkins\’ model (due to Persian\’s mixed head direction). Moreover, they show that the effect of length depends on the degree of determination (or definiteness) of the DO: r - marked (definite) DOs prefer OD-OI-V regardless of length, (existential) indefinite DOs prefer OD-OI- V even more with OD\≥IO, and bare DOs show a less strong preference for OI-OD-V with OD\≥IO. It is argued that these preferences conform to the conceptual account, given that the fact that the effect of length and definiteness converge.

Our data on the relative order between the subject and the DO support these results. Firstly, our corpus data reveal that the degree of definiteness of the DO remains highly relevant: only r - marked DOs occur in OSV order (at the overall rate of 4.6\%). Secondly, we manipulated the relative length and animacy (of the subject) following a 2x2 design in a controlled experiment with r -marked animate DOs (20 items, ex.1), using a web-based sentence completion questionnaire (56 participants). We found (cf. Fig.1) a highly significant effect of animacy (p\<.001), OSV order was more frequent (12\% vs. 4.4\%) for inanimate subjects (1b) than for animate ones (1a), but no effect of length contrary to dependency-based length-minimizing accounts predictions (e.g. Gibson 2000, Hawkins 2004). Meanwhile, the conceptual hypothesis can provide a satisfactory account of these preferences: 1) animacy is a known conceptual factor to influence ordering preferences (e.g. Branigan \& Feleki 1999, Kempen \& Harbusch 2004, Branigan et al. 2008); 2) it is highly likely that the joint effect of definiteness and animacy undermines the
contribution of length to the conceptual
accessibility of the DO.

}, author = {Pegah Faghiri and Barbara Hemforth and Samvelian, Pollet} } @article {Bonami15, title = {The diversity of Inflectional Periphrasis in Persian}, journal = {Journal of Linguistics}, volume = {51}, number = {2}, year = {2015}, doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0022226714000243}, author = {Olivier Bonami and Samvelian, Pollet} } @inproceedings {4440, title = {Accessibility and Word Order: The Case of Ditransitive Constructions in Persian}, year = {2014}, address = {Buffalo, EU}, author = {Pegah Faghiri and Samvelian, Pollet and Barbara Hemforth} } @conference {4459, title = {Heaviness in a Verb-final Language: Evidence from Persian}, year = {2013}, month = {09/2013}, address = {Marseille}, doi = {10.13140/RG.2.1.2450.1924}, author = {Pegah Faghiri and Samvelian, Pollet and Barbara Hemforth} } @inproceedings {sagot11perlextaln, title = {D{\'e}veloppement de ressources pour le persan: le nouveau lexique morphologique PerLex2 et l{\textquoteright}{\'e}tiqueteur morphosyntaxique MElt_fa}, year = {2011}, month = {06/2011}, address = {Montpellier, France}, abstract = {

R{\'e}sum{\'e}. Nous pr{\'e}sentons une nouvelle version de PerLex, lexique morphologique du persan, une version corrig{\'e}e et partiellement r{\'e}annot{\'e}e du corpus {\'e}tiquet{\'e} BijanKhan (BijanKhan, 2004) et MEltfa, un nouvel {\'e}tique- teur morphosyntaxique librement disponible pour le persan. Apr{\`e}s avoir d{\'e}velopp{\'e} une premi{\`e}re version de PerLex (Sagot \& Walther, 2010), nous en proposons donc ici une version am{\'e}lior{\'e}e. Outre une validation manuelle par- tielle, PerLex 2 repose d{\'e}sormais sur un inventaire de cat{\'e}gories linguistiquement motiv{\'e}. Nous avons {\'e}galement d{\'e}velopp{\'e} une nouvelle version du corpus BijanKhan : elle contient des corrections significatives de la tokenisation ainsi qu\&$\#$39;un r{\'e}{\'e}tiquetage {\`a} l\&$\#$39;aide des nouvelles cat{\'e}gories. Cette nouvelle version du corpus a enfin {\'e}t{\'e} utilis{\'e}e pour l\&$\#$39;entra{\^{\i}nement de MEltfa, notre {\'e}tiqueteur morphosyntaxique pour le persan librement disponible, s\&$\#$39;appuyant {\`a} la fois sur ce nouvel inventaire de cat{\'e}gories, sur PerLex 2 et sur le syst{\`e}me d\&$\#$39;{\'e}tiquetage MElt (Denis \& Sagot, 2009).

Abstract. We present a new version of PerLex, the morphological lexicon for the Persian language, a cor- rected and partially re-annotated version of the BijanKhan corpus (BijanKhan, 2004) and MEltfa, a new freely available POS-tagger for the Persian language. After PerLex\&$\#$39;s first version (Sagot \& Walther, 2010), we propose an improved version of our morphological lexicon. Apart from a partial manual validation, PerLex 2 now relies on a set of linguistically motivated POS. Based on these POS, we also developped a new version of the BijanKhan corpus with significant corrections of the tokenisation. It has been re-tagged according to the new set of POS. The new version of the BijanKhan corpus has been used to develop MEltfa, our new freely-available POS-tagger for the Persian language, based on the new POS set, PerLex 2 and the MElt tagging system (Denis \& Sagot, 2009).\ 

}, keywords = {cat{\'e}gories, {\'e}tiqueteur morphosyntaxique, Lexical resource, MElt, MElt., PerLex, persan, Persian, POS, Ressource lexicale, tagger, validation}, author = {Beno{\^\i}t Sagot and G{\'e}raldine Walther and Pegah Faghiri and Samvelian, Pollet} } @inproceedings {sagot11icil, title = {A new morphological lexicon and a POS tagger for the Persian Language}, year = {2011}, note = {

Communication \à la 4eme \édition de la International Conference on Iranian Linguistics (ICIL4). 17-19 juin 2011. Uppsala, Su\ède

}, month = {06/2011}, address = {Uppsala, Su{\`e}de}, abstract = {

In (Sagot and Walther, 2010), the authors introduce an advanced tokenizer and a morpho- logical lexicon for the Persian language named PerLex. In this paper, we describe experiments dedicated to enriching this lexicon and using it for building a POS tagger for Persian.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks such as part-of-speech (POS) tagging or pars- ing as well as most NLP applications require large-scale lexical resources. Yet, such resources rarely are freely available, even though it is the fastest way to building high-quality resources. In this paper, we introduce a new version of the large-scale and freely available morpholog- ical lexicon for Persian named PerLex, which relies on a new linguistically motivated POS inventory as well as several validation steps; we show how we used this new lexicon for gen- erating an improved version of the BijanKhan corpus (BijanKhan, 2004) and training the MElt tagging system (Denis and Sagot, 2009), thus creating a freely available Persian tagger.

The first important NLP project on Persian is the Shiraz project, targeted towards Persian to English automatic translation (Amtrup et al., 2000). Among other things, it produced 50,000 terms bilingual lexicon (which however does not seem to be freely available) based in part on a unification-based description of the Persian morphology (Megerdoomian, 2000). Apart from the Shiraz project, some other NLP tools such as morphological tools and lemmatisers have been developed, although not associated with a full large scale lexicon (cf. the freely available lemmatizer PerStem (Dehdari and Lonsdale, 2008)). To our best knowledge, the only freely available large-coverage lexical resources for Persian are the above-mentioned PerLex lexicon (Sagot and Walther, 2010) and the Persian lexicon within MULTEXT-East version 4 (Erjavec, 2010; QasemiZadeh and Rahimi, 2006). Other recent work on the development of NLP tools and resources for Persian processing is mostly focused on designing part-of-speech taggers (QasemiZadeh and Rahimi, 2006; Shamsfard and Fadaee, 2008), parsers (Dehdari and Lonsdale, 2008) or automatic translation systems.

Improving PerLex The PerLex 1 lexicon (Sagot and Walther, 2010) contained approx. 36,000 lexical entries (lemmas) corresponding to over 520,000 (inflected) form entries describing ap- prox. 500,000 unique forms. Apart from its underlying morphological description, PerLex 1 had mainly been built automatically using automatic lexical data aquisition techniques such as the extraction of lexical entries from the automatically tagged BijanKhan corpus (BijanKhan, 2004) and from Wikipedia. Therefore, the first step towards the construction of a new version, PerLex 2, was to improve the quality of the lexicon by validating the entries extracted from the BijanKhan corpus. We first automatically (pre-)validated a certain amount of entries, us- ing comparison and/or fusion of PerLex with other lexical resources (i.e. the Persian lexicon included in version 4 of MULTEXT-East (henceforth MTE4-fa) (QasemiZadeh and Rahimi, 2006; Erjavec, 2010) and the Persian Pronunciation Dictionary (henceforth PPD) (Deyhime, 2000). Being not freely distributable, we didn\&$\#$39;t use the PPD to provide us with additional entries, but only to pre-validate existing lexical entries, in particular those for which most inflected forms are found in the PPD. On the other hand, MTE4-fa is a freely available and

redistributable morphological lexicon including 13,006lexical entries. We established a map- ping between POS tags found in MTE4-fa and in PerLex, converted MTE4-fa in same format as PerLex and merged it with PerLex. The entries resulting from merging entries from both resources were considered pre-validated. Entries corresponding only to MTE4-fa entries were added to PerLex (in many cases, this required to add the appropriate inflection class manually).

Entries automatically pre-validated were excluded from the manual validation (apart for nouns and adjectives) hence avoiding unecessary manual validation costs. So far, we have carried out two seperate manual validation campaigns using a dedicated online validation in- terface that aims at optimizing validation speed (for example, lexical entries are displayed as a canonical form and the minimal set of inflected forms whose correctness guarantees that the entry\&$\#$39;s inflection class is correct; another example is that the interface allows for specifying most types of inflection class assignment errors (e.g., a lemma ending in یyeh pronounced [i] but considered as if it was pronounced [j]). The first validation campaign created 751vali- dation tickets 451(correct entries, 250correct POS but invalid inflected forms, no invalid POS and 50completely invalid entries, mostly due to encoding bugs we resolved in the meantime). The second validation campaign created 1,097validation tickets 818(correct entries, 17valid POS but invalid inflected forms, 26invalid categories ans 129completely invalid entries, mostly inflected pronominal forms erroneously considered as individual lexical entries).

Another new feature of PerLex 2is its new sound set of POS. PerLex 1had simply adopted the POS used in the BijanKhan corpus (BijanKhan, ;2004Amiri et al., .)2007We decided to convert the lexicon into a new set of linguistically motivated POS (Faghiri \&Samvelian, in prep.): nouns, proper nouns, adjectives, adverbs; verbs, prepositions, conjunctions, classifiers, pronouns, determiners and interjections. The conversion has been realised through automatic conversion techniques. It was straightforward for nouns (N), verbs (V), proper nouns (PN), pronouns (PRO), interjections (INT), delimiters (DELM). For the other POS, precise criteria had to be established manually to re-assign their members. The POS MORP of the BijanKhan corpus has been altogether suppressed since it contained elements contributing to word-formation in various ways but not considered words in the description we adopted. On the other hand, we established a new POS tag for classifiers (CLASS) which replaces the old specifier-tag SPEC.

The size of PerLex 2is similar to that of PerLex 1(suppressing erroneous entries has quantitatively counter-balanced the addition of new entries and the conversion into a new POS set does not result in quantitative differences), yet it is the qualitative improvement, such as the addition of new inflection tables for auxiliairies and light verbs, that characterises PerLex .2

Corpus modification The next step of our work was to develop a new tagger for Persian based on our POS inventory and on PerLex ,2using the MElt tagging system (Denis and Sagot, .)2009We first designed a tagset that is a refinment of this inventory. Our tagset defines 79 tags, among which 37verbal tags, 9pronominal tags and 8nominal tags.

For training the MElt system, we decided to create a new version of the BijanKhan corpus. This new version differs in two ways: first, we improved the original automatic tokenization and annotation of the corpus. Second, we converted the corpus so that it uses our tagset. We started from the version of the corpus used in (Sagot and Walther, ,)2010which is already segmented in 88,885sentences. We applied rule-based transformations for correcting sys- tematic tokenization and/or annotation errors. These include among others various kinds of typographic (e.g., whitespace) inconsistencies (verbal prefixes, nominal suffixes, acronyms, compound prepositions, removal of the MORP category, and others), whose correction require modifications in the annotation itself. We also corrected systematic annotation errors. Next, we needed to convert the corpus annotations into our 79-tag tagset. In order to achieve a good level

of quality, we decided to convert mostly the annotation of those tokens for which we could find a unique tag from our tagset that was consistent with both the corrected corpus annotation and lexical information in PerLex 2. However, in rare cases, heuristics allowed us to choose among various possible tags, as well as to convert annotations for tokens unknown to PerLex (e.g., by relying on morphology-based patterns). The resulting modified BijanKhan corpus was then split in 3 parts. The last 100 sentences (1,568 of their 1,707 tokens could be con- verted) were extracted and the annotations manually converted (when needed) or corrected, leading to a gold standard. Among the remaining sentences, those for which all tokens had been successfully converted constitute a 18,731-sentence training corpus (302,690 tokens).

Tagging Persian with MEltfa Next, we extracted from PerLex 2 a lexicon based on our 79-tag tagset. Together with the above-described (far from error-free) training corpus, this al- lowed us to train the MElt system and generate a tagger for Persian, MEltfa. W.r.t. our gold standard, MEltfa has a 90.3\% accuracy on the full tagset, and a 93.3\% accuracy if we project this tagset on our 14 POS inventory. Evaluated only on the 1,568 tokens for which the anno- tations could be converted automatically, these figures reach respectively 93.9\% and 95.3\%. These figures are probably a lower bound on the accuracy we would reach if all annotations were converted successfully. Indeed, non-converted tokens have not been converted in the training data either: MElt has not learned any contextual information about them, hence more errors on these tokens (this in turn might affect MEltfa\&$\#$39;s decisions on surrounding tokens).

We compared the quality of MEltfa\&$\#$39;s annotations to those resulting from our automatic conversion process. It turns out that the accuracy of these annotations on those 1,568 tokens for which the automatic conversion was successful is exactly the same (93.9\% and 95.3\%) as that of MEltfa, although only 48\% concern the same tokens. In other words, on these 1,568 tokens, MEltfa was able to produce annotations whose quality is the same as the quality of its training corpus, which in turn is higher than that of the original BijanKhan corpus. We believe that this is related both to the use of PerLex as a source of information and to the fact that MEltfa\&$\#$39;s probabilistic model smoothes many errors in its training corpus (with a {\textquoteleft}{\textquoteleft}co- training\&$\#$39;\&$\#$39;-like effect). This latter hypothesis is confirmed by the fact that, among these 1,568 tokens, MEltfa\&$\#$39;s result are slightly closer to the gold standard (93,9\% accuracy on the full tagset) than to its automatically converted version before manual correction (93.4\%).\ 

}, url = {http://web.me.com/gwalther/homepage/Publications_(fr)_files/icil11pergram.pdf}, author = {Beno{\^\i}t Sagot and G{\'e}raldine Walther and Pegah Faghiri and Samvelian, Pollet} } @conference {Bonami10a, title = {Persian complex predicates: Lexeme formation by itself}, year = {2010}, month = {December}, address = {Toulouse}, author = {Olivier Bonami and Samvelian, Pollet} } @conference {Bonami10f, title = {A Persian lesson on periphrasis, typology and Formal Grammar}, year = {2010}, month = {June}, address = {Guildford}, author = {Olivier Bonami and Samvelian, Pollet} } @conference {Bonami09b, title = {The diversity of inflectional periphrasis in Persian}, year = {2009}, month = {september}, address = {Paris}, author = {Olivier Bonami and Samvelian, Pollet} } @inproceedings {Bonami09, title = {Inflectional periphrasis in Persian}, year = {2009}, pages = {26{\textendash}46}, publisher = {CSLI Publications}, address = {Stanford}, url = {http://web.stanford.edu/group/cslipublications/cslipublications/HPSG/2009/bonami-samvelian.pdf}, author = {Olivier Bonami and Samvelian, Pollet}, editor = {Stefan M{\"u}ller} } @conference {Bonami08c, title = {Degrees of Periphrasis in Persian Conjugation}, year = {2008}, month = {December}, address = {Bordeaux}, author = {Olivier Bonami and Samvelian, Pollet} } @conference {Bonami08f, title = {Sorani Kurdish person markers and the typology of agreement}, year = {2008}, month = {February}, address = {Vienna}, author = {Olivier Bonami and Samvelian, Pollet} }