Natural Language Processing in an Indian Language (Bengali)-I: Verb Phrase Analysis

The paper describes Natural Language Processing with Bengali (“Bangla”), a major Indian language and the national language of Bangladesh. A brief description of the linguistic properties of Bengali has established the need for a parser at the word level for lexical handling. An efficient word grammar has been proposed for the purpose. The other major goal of the paper is to analyze and parse Bengali verb phrases in a sentence. Our approach modifies the principles of Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) to suit inflectional Indian languages, especially Bengali. There exist several types of verbs in Bengali language. Also, sentence construction in Bengali can have lavish use of infinite verbs denoting continuity and simultaneity of actions. Ways of handling these features have…