We consider what natural language explanations are required to present a formalism. We desire to be as complete as possible, leaving nothing implicit, and yet to keep the natural language to a minimum, moving as quickly as possible away from informal explanations and into the formalism. We also try to keep the informal explanation as independent as possible of the formalism being presented. We ...

Natural Language and Databases has been a common panel topic for some years, partly because it has been an active area of work, but more importantly, because it has been widely assumed that database access is a good test environment for language research. I thought the time had come to look again at this assumption, and that it would be useful, for COLING 84, to do this. I therefore invited the...

This paper presents the LinguaStream platform, developped to offer an integrated development environment for designing complex natural language processing (NLP) systems. It relies extensively on XML, and demonstrates a practical use of this standard and surrounding ones for NLP, taking particular attention on semantic concerns.