DepAnn - An Annotation Tool for Dependency Treebanks

DepAnn is an interactive annotation tool for dependency treebanks, providing both graphical and text-based annotation interfaces. The tool is aimed for semi-automatic creation of treebanks. It aids the manual inspection and correction of automatically created parses, making the annotation process faster and less error-prone. A novel feature of the tool is that it enables the user to view outputs from several parsers as the basis for creating the final tree to be saved to the treebank. DepAnn uses TIGER-XML, an XML-based general encoding format for both, representing the parser outputs and saving the annotated treebank. The tool includes an automatic consistency checker for sentence structures. In addition, the tool enables users to build structures manually, add comments on the annotations, modify the tagsets, and mark sentences for further revision

Apportioning Development Effort in a Probabilistic LR Parsing System through Evaluation

We describe an implemented system for robust domain-independent syntactic parsing of English, using a unification-based grammar of part-of-speech and punctuation labels coupled with a probabilistic LR parser. We present evaluations of the system's performance along several different dimensions; these enable us to assess the contribution that each individual part is making to the success of the system as a whole, and thus prioritise the effort to be devoted to its further enhancement. Currently, the system is able to parse around 80% of sentences in a substantial corpus of general text containing a number of distinct genres. On a random sample of 250 such sentences the system has a mean crossing bracket rate of 0.71 and recall and precision of 83% and 84% respectively when evaluated against manually-disambiguated analyses.Comment: 10 pages, 1 Postscript figure. To Appear in Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, University of Pennsylvania, May 199

The Mystro system: A comprehensive translator toolkit

Mystro is a system that facilities the construction of compilers, assemblers, code generators, query interpretors, and similar programs. It provides features to encourage the use of iterative enhancement. Mystro was developed in response to the needs of NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC) and enjoys a number of advantages over similar systems. There are other programs available that can be used in building translators. These typically build parser tables, usually supply the source of a parser and parts of a lexical analyzer, but provide little or no aid for code generation. In general, only the front end of the compiler is addressed. Mystro, on the other hand, emphasizes tools for both ends of a compiler

A natural language interface to databases

The development of a Natural Language Interface which is semantic-based and uses Conceptual Dependency representation is presented. The system was developed using Lisp and currently runs on a Symbolics Lisp machine. A key point is that the parser handles morphological analysis, which expands its capabilities of understanding more words