Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics

NooJ is a linguistic development environment that allows linguists to formalize
linguistic phenomena in the orthographical, morphological, syntactic and semantic levels, using a 
range of linguistic resources: dictionaries, finite-state, context-free and context-sensitive 
grammars. NooJ provides linguists with tools to edit, test and debug, maintain a large number of 
linguistic resources, and can apply sets of resources (NooJ modules) to parse large corpora of 
texts in real time. NooJ has been endorsed by the European Community and is now available as an 
open source package, published on the Metashare Web Site. There are over 30 languages that are 
being described with NooJ, see www.nooj4nlp.net.

In this presentation, I will describe the system that allows NooJ to perform transformational 
analysis and generation, i.e. to produce any number of transformed sentences from one given 
sentence. For instance, from the sentence "Joe loves Mary", NooJ produces over 1.4 million 
declarative sentences such as "It is Joe who loves her", "He is no longer in love with Mary". The 
system is reversible, i.e. NooJ can produce the analysis of complex sentences such as "It is not Joe 
who stopped to love her" in the form of a series of semantic features such as "+Declarative 
+ExtractSubject, +Negation, +Aspect="Stop", +Preterit, +PronominalizeObject".