This research begun while I was working at the department of Computational Linguistics at the University of the Saarland and the project BiLD, which is supported by the German Science Foundation in its Special Collaborative Research Program on Artificial Intelligence and Knowledge Based Systems SFB 314. It continued at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz GmbH, DFKI) in the Computational Linguistics area. I am grateful to these institutes for their support.
Many, many people have helped me not to get lost during the development of this thesis. Hans Uszkoreit, my main supervisor, provided a motivating, enthusiastic, and critical atmosphere during the many discussions we had. It was a great pleasure to me to conduct this thesis under his supervision. I also acknowledge Wolfgang Wahlster who as my second supervisor provided constructive comments during my thesis time as well as on the preliminary version of this thesis.
During many discussions and computer demos of my thesis stuff I received a lot of valuable comments from at least the following people: Jan Alexandersson, Rolf Backofen, Sergio Balari, Jim Barnett, Stephan Busemann, Gregor Erbach, Wolfgang Finkler, Dan Flickinger, Karin Harbusch, Elizabeth Hinkelman, Aravind Joshi, Walter Kasper, Martin Kay, Bernd Kiefer, Hans-Ulrich Krieger, John Nerbonne, Klaus Netter, Gertjan van Noord, Stephan Oepen, Thomas Pechmann, Norbert Reithinger, Vijay Shankar, Mark Steedman, Harald Trost, Mats Wirén.
The following people have read draft versions of the thesis: Rolf Backofen, Elizabeth Hinkelman, Bernd Kiefer, Karin Harbusch, Gregor Erbach, and Mats Wirén.
Needless to say, that I am grateful to all of my colleagues at the Computational Linguistics department and at the DFKI for their support (and tolerance); especially I am indebted to the `DISCO people'.
Specials thanks to Gertjan van Noord for the great time during our common `BiLD time'.
Mein innigster Dank gilt meiner Familie Eva, Kevin und Dennis. Ohne ihre Hilfe, Toleranz und ständige Aufmunterung wäre diese Arbeit nie beendet worden.
Postscriptum
This thesis has been submitted to the thesis committee in November 1994. In the meanwhile, an improved and extended version of the thesis content can be found in G. Neumann: Interleaving Natural Language Parsing and Generation Through Uniform Processing, Journal of Artifical Intelligence 99, 1998, 121-163.
A recent comparision of several uniform architectures (including the one proposed in this thesis) can be found in: S. Varges: Parsing und Generierung in uniformen Architekturen, Uni. Düsseldorf, 1997 (summary in English). He also presents a Prolog implementation of the uniform tabular algorithm developed in this thesis.