GwB, A Workbench for Natural Language Grammars

The files are stored in Postscript, in compressed (gzip) form, with the report number as filename. Alternatively, reports are available by post from the above address. Abstract In this report we present a workbench for natural language grammars which was designed as a computational tool to help verifying the theoretical consistency and the empirical adequacy of syntactic and semantic analysis of natural language expressions. 0 Introduction As an intermediate instrumental step in our research on reference processing and binding theory, we built up a grammar workbench which we called GwB. This workbench was primarily designed as a computational tool to help verifying the theoretical consistency and the empirical adequacy of our working hypotheses. In this paper, we report on the architecture underlying GwB and its functionality. Firstly, we present the general language processing framework embodied in the grammar workbench. Secondly, we present a brief survey of the computational systems available for the implementation of that framework and discuss the major aspects of the implementation of GwB in the chosen system. Due to its interdisciplinary nature, the realm of natural language processing has been addressed by a community of researchers coming from diverse scientific disciplines and research traditions, using several different formal and computational tools, and aiming at various development purposes and research goals. Consequently, more often than not, it turns out to be quite hard to compare or combine results on the same or adjacent topics, which 4 may be perfectly confluent, but whose methodological underpinnings may conjure up to give them a totally disparate appearance and impact. Nevertheless, this active and reciprocal exposition to different approaches has contributed also with an emerging trend towards integrative frameworks. A remarkable success in pursuing such desideratum has been achieved with the HPSG environment, which since its inception in late eighties, has evolved to become, according to Uszkoreit, 1996, the " single most influential framework " in basic research in natural language processing. and tools from linguistics and computer science. Its shape is the result of an ingenious blend of influences from data type theory, knowledge representation, unification based formalisms, object-oriented programming, and several nonderivational research traditions in natural language syntax, such as categorial grammar, generalized phrase-structure grammar, arc-pair grammar and logical, computational, linguistic and cognitive issues in the HPSG framework are collected at the HPSG bibliography site, intense research activity in this framework. HPSG is a precise but flexible interleaving of proposals …