Architecture and Coverage of the

DISCO Grammar

Klaus Netter ?

Deutsches Forschungszentrum fur Kunstliche Intelligenz
Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3
D-6600 Saarbrucken 11, Germany
[email protected]

In: S. Busemann / K. Harbusch (1993), Proceedings of the DFKI Workshop on Natural Language Systems: Modularity and Re-usability, DFKI, 1{10

Abstract

In this paper we give a rough sketch of the German grammar that was developed in the DISCO project. The description also includes some characteristics of the grammar formalism and of the various processing components corresponding to different descriptive layers in the grammar.

1 General Characteristics

The DISCO grammar is a German grammar whose syntactic part was developed by K. Netter (with support by J. Nerbonne) and which has an integrated semantic representation developed by J. Nerbonne and W. Kasper [Ner92], [Kas93]. The style of the grammar follows very much the spirit of Head Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) [PS87], [PS93]. However, it also incorporates insights from other grammar frameworks (e.g., categorial grammar) and extensions to the theory which are not yet part of standard HPSG. The grammar is implemented in a formalism called Type Description Language (TDL) which was developed by H.-U. Krieger and U. Schafer [SK92].

The grammar provides interfaces to a morphological component and to a speech act recognition module which operates on syntactic and semantic information [HS93]. The feature structure representation of the semantic representation can be translated directly into the meaning representation language NLL. Alternatively, the translation module can operate on the output of a speech act recognition module [NOD+93].

The grammar is at present mainly used for a system modelling discourse between coorperative agents. It provides the NL front end to the cosma system (COoperative Scheduling Management Agent) whose application domain is appointment scheduling [NOS93].

?The research underlying this paper was supported by a research grant, FKZ ITW 9002 0, from the German Bundesministerium fur Forschung und Technologie to the DFKI project DISCO.