Object-oriented Techniques in Grammar and Ontology Specification

Currently, much effort is spent for the creation of linguistic resources such as grammars or domain models each time a new task oriented spoken language application is deployed. The resources for different applications, though different, resemble each other enough to warrant reusability of subcomponents. In this paper, we describe the application of techniques known from object oriented programming languages to grammar and ontology specification. To this end, we introduce a grammar formalism that is designed such that it supports the application of modularized development, multiple inheritance and deferred (or abstract) base specifications. In particular, we demonstrate how the combination of multiple inheritance together with deferred specifications and specification modules with name spaces facilitates rapid prototyping of ontologies and grammars for new domains and new target languages.