Criteria for Designing Computer Facilities for Linguistic Analysis

In the natural-Ianguage-proce88ing re8earch community, the u8efulne88 of computer tool8 for te8ting lingui8tic analY8e8 i8 often taken for granted. LingUi8t8, on the other hand, have generally been unaware of or ambivalent about 8uch device8. We di8cu88 8everal a5pect5 of computer U5e that are preeminent in e5tabli5hing the utility for lingui5tic re5earch of computer tool5 and de5cribe 5everal factor5 that mU5t be comidered in de8igning wch com· puter tool5 to aid in te5ting lingui5tic analY5e5 of grammatical phenomena. A 5erie8 of de8ign alternative8, 80me theoretically and 80me practically moti· vated, i5 then based on the rC5ultant criteria. Wc pre8ent one way of pinning down these choices which culminatC5 in a dC5cription of a particular grammar formali8m for use in computer linguistic tool5. The PATR-II formali5m thus serves to ezemplify our general per5pective. This research was made possible, in part, by a gift from the SystemB Development Foun~ dation; additional support waa provided by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency under Contract N00039-84-K-0078 with the Naval Electronic. Sy6tems Command. The views a.nd conclusions contained in this document should not be interpreted as representa.tive of the official poJidest either expressed or implied, of the Defense Re~ sea.rch Projects Agency or the United States government. The a.uthor is indebted to William Crolt1 Gerald Gazda.r, Ewart Klein, Fernando Pereira, and Hans Us:z:koreit for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper.