Evaluating a Crosslinguistic Grammar Resource: A Case Study of Wambaya

This paper evaluates the LinGO Grammar Matrix, a cross-linguistic resource for the development of precision broad coverage grammars, by applying it to the Australian language Wambaya. Despite large typological differences between Wambaya and the languages on which the development of the resource was based, the Grammar Matrix is found to provide a significant jump-start in the creation of the grammar for Wambaya: With less than 5.5 person-weeks of development, the Wambaya grammar was able to assign correct semantic representations to 76% of the sentences in a naturally occurring text. While the work on Wambaya identified some areas of refinement for the Grammar Matrix, 59% of the Matrix-provided types were invoked in the final Wambaya grammar, and only 4% of the Matrix-provided types required modification.