Automatically Generating Tree Adjoining Grammars from Abstract Specifications

TRACT SPECIFICATIONS FEI XIA AND MARTHA PALMER Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104 K. VIJAY-SHANKER Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716 The paper describes a system that can automatically generate tree adjoining grammars from abstract specifications. Our system is based on the use of tree descriptions to specify a grammar by separately defining pieces of tree structure that encode independent syntactic principles. Various individual specifications are then combined to form the elementary trees of the grammar. The system enables efficient development and maintenance of a grammar, and also allows underlying linguistic constructions (such as wh-movement) to be expressed explicitly. We have carefully designed our system to be as language independent as possible and tested its performance by constructing both English and Chinese grammars, with significant reductions in grammar...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2005
• Where: CI
• Authors: Fei Xia, Martha Palmer, K. Vijay-Shanker
• Keywords: CI 2005, Grammars, Information Science, Specification