LINGUIST List 4.222

Fri 26 Mar 1993

Sum: Grammar engineering

Editor for this issue: <>

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1. , Grammar Engineering

Some weeks ago I had posted a query with the above header. I had asked for
references and general comments. I received messages from the following
people and I very much appreciate their encouraging responses.

Rick Wojcik <rwojcikatc.boeing.com>
Philippe Blache <pbllaor.unice.fr>
Carl Vogel <vogelcogsci.edinburgh.ac.uk>
Paul Purdom <pwpcs.indiana.edu>
Piet Mertens <pmertenscc3.kuleuven.ac.be>
John Batali <batalicogsci.ucsd.edu>
Aris Vagelatos <vagelatgrpatvx1.bitnet>
Thierry J. van Steenberghe <tvsetal.ucl.ac.be>

They have given the following bibliographic information: (I have omitted
some that I have found not relevant to the topic.)

Bouchard & al. "First results of a french linguistic development environment"
Coling 92.

Richard Wojcik, Philip Harrison, John Bremer: USING BRACKETED PARSES TO
 EVALUATE
A GRAMMAR CHECKING APPLICATION, Boeing Report (submitted to ACL 93).

Berwick: The Acquistion of Syntactic Knowledge

Mark Johnson: "Attribute-Value Logic and the Theory of Grammar",
 Center for the Study of Language and Information,
 Stanford University, 1988, C.S.L.I.. Lecture Notes, Number 16

Also a paper by Johnson in Computational Linguistics, Volume 17,
Number 2.

Hassan Ait-Kaci and Patrick Lincoln,
 LIFE: A Natural Language for Natural Language",
 February, 1988,
 institution MCC, ACA-ST-074-88, Austin, TX

J.Aarts.
 The LDB: A linguistic database.
 ICAME News, 8:25--30, 1984.

J.Aarts and Th. van den Heuvel.
 Computational tools for the syntactic analysis of corpora.
 Linguistics, 23:303--335, 1985.

J.Aarts and W.Meijs, editors.
 Corpus Linguistics. Recent Developments in the Use of Computer
 Corpora in English Language Research.
 Rodopi, Amsterdam, 1984.

J.Aarts and W.Meijs, editors.
 Corpus Linguistics II. New Studies in the Analysis and
 Exploitation of Computer Corpora.
 Rodopi, Amsterdam, 1986.

E.Ditters.
 Descriptive tools for the automatic syntactic processing of natural
 language: the case of Arabic.
 In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference of the
 Linguistic Society of Morocco, pages 1--21, Rabat, 1988.

E.Ditters.
 A formal grammar for automatic syntactic analysis and other
 applications.
 In Proceedings of the Regional Conference on Informatics and
 Arabization, volume1, pages 128--145, Tunis, 1988.

Th. van den Heuvel.
 TOSCA: An aid for building syntactic databases.
 Literary and Linguistic Computing, 3:147--151, 1988.

Th. van de Heuvel et al.
 Extended Affix Grammars in Linguistics. A Manual.
 English Department, University of Nijmegen, 1983.

H.Alblas and B.Melichar, editors.
 Attribute Grammars, Applications and Systems, volume 461
of Lecture Notes in Computer Science.
 Springer Verlag, 1991.

Y.Choueka, editor.
 Computers in Literary and Linguistic Research $^\ast$ Literary
 and Linguistic Computing, Paris, Geneva, 1990. Champion-Slatkine.
 Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference, Jerusalem 5--9
 June 1988.

P.Deransart and M.Jourdan, editors.
 Attribute Grammars and Their Applications, volume 461 of
 Lecture Notes in Computer Science.
 Springer Verlag, 1990.


General remarks:
-----------------
- to get in touch with Dr. Fred Popowich of Simon Fraser University,
who as done work on grammer development environments.

- to get in touch with ISSCO-Geneva where a grammar development environment
 [named ELU] has been developped and used to build reversible unification
 grammars.

- to get in touch with Amsterdam University ("They also have a number of things
 available.")

This is what I received. Let me add some of my own favourite articles on the
 subject.

Boguraev, B. et al.: Software Support for Practical Grammar
Development. Proc. of COLING, Budapest, 1988, 54-58.

Boitet, C.: Software und Lingware Engineering in Modern M(A)T
Systems. In: B\'atori, I. et al. (Eds.): Computational
Linguistics. An international handbook on Computer Oriented
Language Research and Applications. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter,
1989.

D\"orre, J.; Raasch, I.: The STUF Workbench. In: Herzog, O.;
Rollinger, C.-R. (Eds.): Text Understanding in LILOG.
Integrating Computational Linguistics and Artificial
Intelligence. Final Report on the IBM Germany LILOG-Project.
(Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence 546) Berlin:
Springer-Verlag, 1991, 55-62.

Erbach, G.; Uszkoreit, H.: Grammar Engineering: Problems and
Prospects. Report on the Saarbr\"ucken Grammar Engineering
Workshop. Saarbr\"ucken: Universit\"at des Saarlandes,
Computerlinguistik. 1990.

Erbach, G.: Tools for Grammar Engineering. Proc. of Applied
Natural Language Processing, Trento, Italien, 1992, 243-244.

Flickinger, D. et al.: Toward Evaluation of NLP Systems.
(Research Report) Palo Alto,CA: Hewlett-Packard Laboratories.
November 1989.

Gazdar, G.: Computational tools for doing linguistics:
introduction. Linguistics 23, 2 (1985), 185-187.

Grishman, R.; Macleod, C.; Sterling, J.: Evaluating parsing
strategies using standardized parse files. Proc. of Applied
Natural Language Processing, Trento, Italien, 1992, 156-161.

Guida, Mauri: A formal basis for perfomance evaluation of NL
understanding systems. Computational Linguistics 1984, S.
15ff.

Heyer, G.; Figge, U.: Sprachtechnologie und Praxis der
maschinellen Sprachverarbeitung. Sprache und
Datenverarbeitung, 2 (1989), 41-51.

Heyer, G.: Probleme und Aufgaben einer angewandten CL. KI 1,
1990, 38-42.

Nerbonne, J. et al.: A diagnostic tool for German syntax.
(Research Report RR-91-18) Saarbr\"ucken: DFKI. Juli 1991.

Read, W. et al.: Evaluating Natural Language Systems: A
sourcebook approach. Proc. of COLING, Budapest, 1988, 530-534.

Schifferer, K.: TAGDevEnv. Eine Werkbank f\"ur TAGs. In:
B\'atori, I. et al. (Hgg.): Computerlinguistik und ihre
theoretischen Grundlagen. Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1988.

Seiffert, R.: How could a good system of practical NLP look
like? (IWBS Report 228) Stuttgart: IBM, Institut f\"ur
wissensbasierte Systeme. Juli 1992.

Velardi, P.: Why translators still sleep in peace? (Four
Engineering and Linguistic Principles). Proc. of COLING,
Helsinki, 1990, 383-388.

Volk, M.: The role of testing in grammar engineering. Proc. of
Applied Natural Language Processing, Trento, Italien, 1992,
257-258.

Zajac, R.: Towards computer-aided linguistic engineering.
Proc. of COLING-92, Nantes, 1992, 828-834.

I observe that there are many papers on tools for the development of
large grammars but there are hardly any on methods for developing such grammars.
How, then, do people go about developing grammars? Where do they start?
How do they measure progress, quality, coverage? How can a grammar be
modularized? How can it be documented?

Martin Volk

**************************************************************************
* Martin Volk
* University of Koblenz-Landau Tel (+49) 261-9119-469
* Institute of Computational Linguistics
* Rheinau 3-4 FAX (+49) 261-37524
* W-5400 Koblenz, Germany Martin.Volkinformatik.uni-koblenz.de
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