tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "Metagrammar Engineering: Towards systematic exploration of implemented grammars"

When designing grammars of natural language, typically, more than one formal analysis can account for a given phenomenon. Moreover, because analyses interact, the choices made by the engineer influence the possibilities available in further grammar development. The order in which phenomena are treated may therefore have a major impact on the resulting grammar. | Metagrammar Engineering Towards systematic exploration of implemented grammars Antske Fokkens Department of Computational Linguistics Saarland University German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence DFKI Project Office Berlin Alt-Moabit 91c 10559 Berlin Germany afokkens@ Abstract When designing grammars of natural language typically more than one formal analysis can account for a given phenomenon. Moreover because analyses interact the choices made by the engineer influence the possibilities available in further grammar development. The order in which phenomena are treated may therefore have a major impact on the resulting grammar. This paper proposes to tackle this problem by using metagrammar development as a methodology for grammar engineering. I argue that metagrammar engineering as an approach facilitates the systematic exploration of grammars through comparison of competing analyses. The idea is illustrated through a comparative study of auxiliary structures in HPSG-based grammars for German and Dutch. Auxiliaries form a central phenomenon of German and Dutch and are likely to influence many components of the grammar. This study shows that a special auxiliary verb construction significantly improves efficiency compared to the standard argument-composition analysis for both parsing and generation. 1 Introduction One of the challenges in designing grammars of natural language is that typically more than one formal analysis can account for a given phenomenon. The criteria for choosing between competing analyses are fairly clear observational adequacy analytical clarity efficiency but given that analyses of different phenomena interact actually evaluating anal yses on those criteria in a systematic manner is faf06 Jures presented in Bender 2010 significantly im- from straightforward. The standard methodology involves either picking one analysis and seeing how it goes then backing out if it does not work out or laboriously adapting a .