Implementing Hpsg with Modular Tools for Fast Compiling and Parsing

We describe a modular HPSG implementation , based on a set of tools rather than a single monolithic engine such as ALE. With these tools we can use techniques for much faster compiling and parsing than ALE. We use two-stage grammar compilation with partial execution and a concurrent process implementation of the chart for fast parsing. We compile HPSG lexical rules into Prolog rules used at run-time by the morphological preprocess, thus eliminating lexical rule expansion at compile-time as in ALE. This gives fast lexicon compilation, and also allows further exploitation of lexical rules to eliminate empty categories.