[Fwd: Re: [developers] processing of lexical rules]

[Ann Copestake]

I had a quick look at some of Emily and Jeff's slides already and this all 
seems very sensible.  I don't see why, in principle, there should be a problem 
about supporting morphophonology in the same db as is used for the LKB/PET but 
there may be practical problems to do with XFST etc, of course.  It looks as 
though a Windows port of the LKB db stuff should become possible in principle 
soon, btw.

I still think that in terms of integrating an external morphophonology system 
and the LKB, by far the easiest approach will be for the external system to 
instantiate a chart (i.e. the retokenisation option). The alternative of 
making it guide a partial derivation involves much more detailed integration 
of code, and isn't suitable for a pipelined implementation.

In terms of conceptualising this as turning funny morphology into Italian or 
whatever - I'm happy with that.  But I just want to point out that if you 
don't want to conceptualise these intermediate entities as things that can be 
modelled as strings, you don't have to (as far as the LKB is concerned), 
because the idea is to support instantiation of the chart with feature 
structures directly.  The morphophonology as FST paradigm does, of course, 
tend to limit you somewhat, but I think it may make sense to think of the 
output of morphophonology as structured objects.

Ann