Stefanie Schachtl

Trace & Unification Grammar

This paper presents Trace & Unification Grammar (TUG), a declarative and reversible grammar formalism that brings together Unification Grammar (UG) and ideas of Government & Binding Theory (GB). The main part of the paper consists in a description of many free word order phenomena of German syntax. It will be shown that the use of traces allows for an easier and more elegant way of description than competing approaches like ID/LP-format rules as used e.g. in GPSG and HPSG. Grammars written in the TUG-formalism can be compiled to a very efficient parser. The occurrence of head movement, wh-movement and scrambling in one sentence does not lead to any decrease in parsing efficiency.

Interaction Modalities for Digital Product Memories

Interacting with Digital Product Memories (DPMs) along the supply chain occurs in a variety of scenarios with different users in different locations with different tasks. This chapter discusses solutions for the modality layer, which establishes the end point of a communication channel between an actor and the DPM, connecting the user to the dialog logic of an application based on DPMs.

The Problem of Overgeneration in Parsing Processes and the Aid of Linguistic Generalizations

The aim of this paper is to show by means of a simple example from German noun-phrase syntax how the appropriate linguistic generalizations succeed in overcoming the problem of overgeneration in parsing processes. The phenomenon which is discussed here is rarely mentioned in the linguistic literature and is clarified and formalized for the first time in this paper.

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.

Callable Manuals – Access to Product Documentation via Voice (Anrufbare Bedienungsanleitungen – Zugang zu Produktdokumentation über Sprache)

Abstract This paper describes the adaptation and usage of a general purpose spoken dialog system (SDS) for an experimental telephony based online help system. It presents the basic philosophy of the SDS, the application building process and the results of a usability test.

Adapting a Large Scale MT System for Spoken Language

This paper describes an attempt to transform a general purpose machine translation system that had originally been designed for human aided computer translation of technical documentation into the linguistic component of a domain dependent spoken language translation system for remote PC maintenance. In the first part, the translation system is described. The second part describes the measures taken to adapt it to the spoken language task.

Sprachanalyse und Textgenerierung im natürlich-sprachlichen Beratungssystem WISBER

Im BMFT-Verbundprojekt WISBER wurde der Prototyp eines naturlichsprachlichen Beratungssystems entwickelt. Als exemplarischer Diskursbereich wurde die Geldanlage gewahlt. Neben den Komponenten, die das Beratungswissen der Domane und den Beratungsvorgang modellieren (vgl. hierzu im Detail [Bergmann/Gerlach 87]), stellen die Komponenten zur Sprachanalyse und zur Textgenerierung wesentliche Module des Systems dar, da sie die unmittelbare Kommunikation mit dem Benutzer realisieren. Dies geschieht in der Form eines in Deutsch gefuhrten, gemischt-initiativen Dialogs, in dem die fur eine Beratung notwendige Information ermittelt und das Beratungsergebnis naturlichsprachlich mitgeteilt wird.