An XML Architecture for Shallow and Deep Processing

The paper presents a set of XML tools for natural language processing such as regular grammars, constraints, transformations, remove and insert operations. The architecture allows any combinations of the tools depending on the task and the concrete analysis. The main control mechanism is the backtracking which depends on achieving a particular subgoal in the analysis. The main advantage of the architecture is better control over interleaving of ”sure” steps (the shallow processing) and the ”uncertain” steps (the deep processing). In this way the grammar developers can apply shallow processing not just as a first step, but at any level of processing. We define shallow processing as a sequence of deterministic analyses and deep processing as a sequence of non-deterministic analyses. Thus the shallow and the deep components can be applied to each language level (morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics). The complexity of the processing depends on the complexity of the concrete task, not on the language level.