[lkb] Getting Parse results from LKB

[Berthold Crysmann]

Bernhard Fisseni wrote:
> Good evening,
>
> for a course on accesibility in the WWW, a colleague of mine and I (me)
> we wanted to try GG as the grammar for German to avoid re-inventing
> the grammar wheel; using LKB or pet to interface it with a tts system
> seemed a good idea.
>
Dear Bernhard,

this looks like a very interesting application. If you need any 
information grammar-wise, feel free to contact me.

Somewhat related to your TTS scenario, there  is  a most recent MA  
thesis submitted by Philipp von Böselager at Cologne University 
(Phonetik/Sprachliche Informationsverarbeitung), where he  interfaced  
GG (in generation mode)  with the MARY text-to-speech system, using the  
grammar as the basis for disambiguating prosody in a CTS setting. The 
component takes HPSG trees ("functional" rule back bone and labelled 
PS-tree) as input to XSLT style sheets that insert prosodic mark-up for 
the MARY TTS-engine. He also ran experiments on the disambiguation 
effect of the synthesized prosody with some good results. If you are 
interested in this work, I can let him know.

Cheers,

Berthold
> But for some reason, I don't find the part of the documentation of
> either programme that tells me whether there is any way to easily access
> the syntactic representation[2] "from the outside" (e.g. the tty
> interface of LKB), getting some plain text or even XML output?  (I'm
> probably searching for documentation in the wrong places – sorry!)
>
> Could you help me and tell me how to access the syntactic
> representation?  Or would it be a good idea to have a look at trollet or
> the lkb web server and modify what they do (they seem to have access to
> syntactic information)?  (And, is there any chance to arrive at a
> working GUIless LKB with clisp or sbcl in the very near future?)
>
> I'd be grateful for any hints,
> Bernhard
>
> [1]  Using the binary LKB under Linux would be nice because it installed
> quite nicely.
>
> [2] For the moment, syntactic structures seem a bit more important to us
> than semantics.  It's just too difficult to pronounce MRSes. ;-)
>