A Development Environment For Large-Scale Multi-Lingual Parsing Systems

We describe the development environment available to linguistic developers in our lab in writing large-scale grammars for multiple languages. The environment consists of the tools that assist writing linguistic rules and running regression testing against large corpora, both of which are indispensable for realistic development of large-scale parsing systems. We also emphasize the importance of parser efficiency as an integral part of efficient parser development. The tools and methods described in this paper are actively used in the daily development of broad-coverage natural language understanding systems in seven languages (Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese, Korean and Spanish).