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Collaborative Language Engineering

A Case Study in Efficient Grammar-Based Processing

Following high hopes and subsequent disillusionment in the late 1980s, the past decade of work in language engineering has seen a dramatic increase in the power and sophistication of statistical approaches to natural language processing, along with a growing recognition that these methods alone cannot meet the full range of demands for applications of NLP. While statistical methods, often described as ’shallow’ processing techniques, can bring real advantages in robustness and efficiency, they do not provide the precise, reliable representations of meaning which more conventional symbolic grammars can supply for natural language. A consistent, fine-grained mapping between form and meaning is of critical importance in some NLP applications, including machine translation, speech prosthesis, and automated email response. Recent advances in grammar development and processing implementations offer hope of meeting these demands for precision.

This volume provides an update on the state of the art in the development and application of broad-coverage declarative grammars built on sound linguistic foundations - the ’deep’ processing paradigm - and presents several aspects of an international research effort to produce comprehensive, re-usable grammars and efficient technology for parsing and generating with such grammars.

271 pages | © 2001

Lecture Notes

Language and Linguistics: Formal Logic and Computational Linguistics


Table of Contents

Contributors
Preface
Stephan Oepen, Dan Flickinger, Hans Uszkoreit, and Jun-ichi Tsujii
1. On Building a More Efficient Grammar by Exploiting Types
Dan Flickinger
2. Native-Code Compilation of Feature Structures
Takaki Makino, Yusuke Miyao, Kentaro Torisawa, and Jun-ichi Tsujii
3. A Context-Free Approximation of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar
Bernd Kiefer and Hans-Ulrich Krieger
4. CFG Filtering and Parsing Strategies
Kentaro Torisawa, Kenji Nishida, Yusuke Miyao, and Jun-ichi Tsujii
5. Efficient Feature Structure Operations Without Compilation
Rob Malouf, John Carroll, and Ann Copestake
6. Pre-processing and Encoding Techniques in PET
Ulrich Callmeier
7. Efficient and Thread-Safe Unification with LinGO
Marcel P. van Lohuizen
8. LIGHT AM Another Abstract Machine for FS Unification
Liviu Ciortuz
9. Efficient Parsing for Unification-Based Grammars
Stephan Oepen and John Carroll
A. Definitions of Typed Feature Structures
Ann Copestake
Author Index
Subject Index

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