Hans-Ulrich Block

Incremental construction of c- and f-structure in a LFG-parser

In this paper we present a parser for Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) which is characterised by incrementally constructing the cand f-structure of a sentence during the parse. We then discuss the possibilities of the earliest check on consistency, coherence and completeness. Incremental construction of f-structure leads to an early detection and abort ion of incorrect paths and so increases parsing efficiency. Furthermore those semantic interpretat ion processes that operate on partial structures can be tr iggered at an earlier state. This also leads to a considerable improvement in parsing time. LFG seems to be well suited for such an approach because it provides for locality principles by the def in i t ion of coherence and completeness.

What a Grammar of Spoken Dialogues has to Deal With

The promising results speech recognition achieved in the recent years confront computational linguistics with a new task. The attractivity of speech understanding systems in the market justifies the effort to cope with spoken language computationally. This article is intended to sharpen the awareness of the difficulties that lurk behind the knowledge transfer from text to speech understanding. The comparison of the grammars of spoken and written language, especially the surplus of regular constructions in spoken language are the subject of several linguistic works, reviewed here to set up a sort of syntactic agenda for speech understanding systems. Nothing is said however about the various methods that will help to fulfill this agenda.

An Efficiency-Oriented LFG Parser

This paper describes work with the aim of the development of an LFGbased parser and grammar development system, which is to be applied as syntactic analysis component in a natural language consulting system under development. The implementation of the parser and the grammar development environment has been performed in Interlisp-D on a Lisp machine. The parser covers the various types of equations proposed in LFG (as described in Kaplan/Bresnan 82); the grammar development environment enables the grammar writer to specify the linguistic knowledge sources like grammar and lexicon in a descriptive way, where the specification format is very near the standard notational conventions used in LFG.