[developers] Fwd: HPSG implementations

[Stefan Müller]

Dear Emily,

Am 02/08/2010 04:48 PM, schrieb Emily M. Bender:
> Hi Stefan,
> 
> A few more ideas:
> 
> --- Are you also pointing to implemented work in LFG (and *TAG and 
> other frameworks)?

Yes, and right now, I am afriad, the book is biased. I know of XLE and
XTAG things, but references and languages are lacking.

> --- I have a couple of papers in which I argue that grammar
> engineering is essential for hypothesis testing (and in fact, that
> grammars are complex enough that without implementation, we can't
> really tell if they work the way we as linguists think they do).  One
> is in TLSX (bibtex below).

Thank you very much!

Do you know that I made this point in my Saarbrücken Thesis? (German
again, I know ...)

It is in the final remarks (Chapter 22).
@Book{Mueller99a,
  author      =	{Stefan M{\"u}ller},
  title	      =	{{Deutsche Syntax deklarativ. Head-Driven Phrase
Structure Grammar f\"ur das Deutsche}},
  publisher   =	Niemeyer,
  address     =	{T\"ubingen},
  series      =	{Linguistische Arbeiten},
  number      =	394,
  url = {http://hpsg.fu-berlin.de/~stefan/Pub/hpsg.html},
  year	      =	"1999"
}

In that chapter I discuss the interaction between partial verb phrase
fronting and the third construction. I found a sentence in a paper by
Klaus Netter and I had no idea what the correct analysis could be. I
switched on the computer and since both phenomena were implemented, I
got an analysis in less than a second and understood what was going on.
The computer was smarter than I was (Literature guys say: The text is
smarter than the author), and the grammar made predictions which I did
not build in.

This was one of the highlights in my life as a grammar implementor and
linguist.


In the chapter I contrast Chomsky's view with Manfred Bierwisch's:

This is Chomsky:
> I think that we are, in fact,
> beginning to approach a grasp of certain basic principles of grammar
> at what may be the appropriate level of abstraction. At the same
> time, it is ne- cessary to investigate them and determine their
> empirical adequacy by developing quite specific mechanisms. We should,
> then, try to distinguish as clearly as we can between dis- cussions
> that bears on leading ideas and discussions that bears on the choice
> of specific realizations of them. (Chomsky, 1981, S. 2–3)

And this is Bierwisch in 1963!
> Es ist also sehr wohl möglich, daß mit den formulierten Regeln Sätze
> erzeugt werden können, die auch in einer nicht vorausgesehenen Weise
> aus der Menge der grammatisch richtigen Sätze herausfallen, die also
> durch Eigenschaften gegen die Grammatikalität verstoßen, die wir
> nicht wissentlich aus der Untersuchung ausgeschlossen haben. Das ist
> der Sinn der Feststellung, daß eine Grammatik eine Hypothese über die
> Struktur einer Sprache ist. Eine systematische Überprüfung der
> Implikationen einer für natürliche Sprachen angemessenen Grammatik
> ist sicherlich eine mit Hand nicht mehr zu bewältigende Aufgabe. Sie
> könnte vorgenommen werden, indem die Grammatik als Rechenprogramm in
> einem Elektronenrechner realisiert wird, so daß überprüft werden
> kann, in welchem Maße das Resultat von der zu beschreibenden Sprache
> abweicht. (Bierwisch, 1963, S. 163) 

He says: It is well possible that the rules that we formulated generate
sentences which are outside of the set of grammatical sentences in an
unpredictable way, that is, they violate grammaticality due to
properties that we did not exclude deliberately in our examination. This
is meant by the statement that a grammar is a hypothesis about the
structure of a language. A systematic check of the implications of a
grammar that is appropriate for natural languages is surely a task that
cannot be done by hand any more. This task could be solved by
implementing the grammar as a calculating task on a computer so that it
becomes possible to verify to which degree the result deviates from the
language to be described.

@Book{Bierwisch63,
  author      =	{Manfred Bierwisch},
  title	      =	{{Grammatik des deutschen Verbs}},
  publisher   =	{Akademie Verlag},
  address     =	{Berlin},
  series      =	{studia grammatica II},
  year	      =	1963
}

Sorry for my bad Englisch. [Elektronenrechner is old fashioned for
computer, maybe main frame would be a more appropriate translation]


Best wishes

        Stefan

-- 
Stefan Müller       Tel: (+49) (+30) 838 52973
                    Fax: (+49) (030) 838 4 52973
Institut für Deutsche und Niederländische Philologie
Deutsche Grammatik
Habelschwerdter Allee 45
14 195 Berlin

http://hpsg.fu-berlin.de/~stefan/

http://hpsg.fu-berlin.de/~stefan/Babel/Interaktiv/