HunGram vs. EngGram in ParGram: On the comparison of Hungarian and English in an international computational linguistics project

The goal of this paper is to offer an overview of a recently launched computational linguistic project at the Department of English Linguistics at the University of Debrecen. The project aims at developing a syntactic and morphological analysis of the Hungarian language within the basic linguistic framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG), with special emphasis laid on a comparative English vs. Hungarian aspect. This initiative is a contribution to a large-scale LFG-based international computational linguistic collaboration: Parallel Grammars (PargGram), which is coordinated by Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in California. In this paper, we discuss the most crucial features of LFG and the computational linguistic apparatus developed by ParGram (in a framework called XLE), and we illustrate them by the help of a sample analysis of some fundamental properties of English and Hungarian noun phrases.