Leo: an Architecture for Sharing Resources for Unification-Based Grammars

Many mature systems for parsing unification-based grammars have been developed over the last two decades. They incorporate a variety of design decisions both in implementation and in the representations they use for grammatical information. The Leo project aims to provide an architecture for automating the sharing of grammatical resources among various systems so that one system can take advantage of specialized algorithms and tools that are implemented for the representations used by another. The project furthermore seeks to learn about best practice in the design of these representations and encode their principles in a new XML-based format. This paper describes initial work toward creating the Leo architecture and tools that convert between different representations.