Publikation
Metagrammar Engineering: Towards systematic exploration of implemented grammars
Antske Fokkens
In: Proceedings of ACL-HLT 2011. Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (ACL-HLT-2011), June 20-22, Portland, OR, USA, Association for Computational Linguistics, 2011.
Zusammenfassung
When designing grammars of natural lan-
guage, typically, more than one formal anal-
ysis can account for a given phenomenon.
Moreover, because analyses interact, the
choices made by the engineer influence the
possibilities available in further grammar de-
velopment. The order in which phenomena
are treated may therefore have a major impact
on the resulting grammar. This paper proposes
to tackle this problem by using metagrammar
development as a methodology for grammar
engineering. I argue that metagrammar engi-
neering as an approach facilitates the system-
atic exploration of grammars through compar-
ison of competing analyses. The idea is illus-
trated through a comparative study of auxil-
iary structures in HPSG-based grammars for
German and Dutch. Auxiliaries form a cen-
tral phenomenon of German and Dutch and
are likely to influence many components of
the grammar. This study shows that a spe-
cial auxiliary+verb construction significantly
improves efficiency compared to the standard
argument-composition analysis for both pars-
ing and generation.