Grammar Sharing Between English and French

The phrase structure grammar of the Microsoft Natural Language Understanding System for English proved to be a good base for a Core-Romance grammar, which we are currently developing by experimenting on French. English-specific rules and rule conditions were removed, and some code necessary to process Romance structures was added. The resulting grammar tested favorable on a pre-parsed corpus of 386 French sentences, achieving a rate of success of 68% in short time. Testing on an unedited balanced corpus of French yielded a parsing success rate of 54%. The grammar experiment took approximately three months to complete.