Högskolan i Skövde

We describe a novel system for automatic extraction of typological linguistic information from descriptive grammars of natural languages, applying the theory of frame semantics in the form of frame-semantic parsing. The current proof-of-concept system covers a few selected linguistic features, but the methodology is general and can be extended not only to other typological features but also to descriptive grammars written in languages other than English. Such a system is expected to be a useful assistance for automatic curation of typological databases which otherwise are built manually, a very labor and time consuming as well as cognitively taxing enterprise.