Future Development

System development and maintenance continue in the DFKI Language Technology Lab where PAGE is actively used in several application-oriented research projects and integrated with various demonstrators and prototype applications.

Future developments of the PAGE core engine are expected to address the following issues:

• User Interfaces The current ASCII-based command shell plus the graphical feature editor and chart display already provide the grammar writer with a flexible and powerful development and debugging environment. However, the PAGE user interface yet lacks robustness, built-in help and a homogenious look & feel for the graphical components
• Processing Efficiency Though the overall system performance is sufficient for comfortable grammar development, the PAGE processing efficiency needs substantial improvement for time-critical or even interactive applications. Performance modelling building on compilation, learning, and control strategy approaches are all pursued in the DFKI computational linguistics laboratory and shall become available in integration with PAGE in the near future.
• Documentation Besides completing the user-level and reference documentation on the individual components in PAGE , more detailed instructions on installing and operating the system and a tutorial on grammar engineering in PAGE are required.