DFKI, DFKI Research Reports (RR), Vol. 03-01, 2003.
Abstract
We present the system description language SDL that offers a declarative way of specifying new complex systems from already existing modules with the help of three operators: sequence, parallelism, and unrestricted iteration. Given a system description and modules that implement a minimal interface, the SDL compiler returns a running Java program which realizes exactly the desired behavior of the original specification. The execution semantics of SDL is complemented by a precise formal semantics, defined in terms of concepts of function theory. The SDL compiler is part of the SProUT shallow language platform, a system for the development and pro- cessing of multilingual resources. We believe that the application of SDL is not only limited to the construction of pure NLP systems, but can also be employed in the definition of general software systems.
