Alfa-informatica & BCN, University of Groningen {vannoord, gosse}Olet. rug. nl parsers and generators for natural languages. The package is written in Sicstus Prolog and Tcl/Tk. The system provides a graphical user interface with a command interpreter, and a number of visualisation tools, including visualisation of fea- ture structures, syntax trees, type hierarchies, lexical hierarchies, feature structure trees, definite clause definitions, grammar rules, lexical entries, and graphs of statis- tical information of various kinds.

The NWO Priority Programme Language and Speech Technology is a 5-year research programme aiming at the development of spoken language information systems. In the Programme, two alternative natural language processing (NLP) modules are developed in parallel: a grammar-based (conventional, rule-based) module and a data-oriented (memorybased, stochastic, DOP) module. In order to compare the NLP modules, a formal evaluation has been carried out three years after the start of the Programme. This paper describes the evaluation procedure and the evaluation results. The grammar-based component performs much better than the data-oriented one in this comparison.

this report we refer to this update as the `best update').

ion (Johnson and Dorre, [39]) ffl x(A,B,f(A,B),g(A,h(B,i(C)))) =) x(A,B,f(,),g(,)) ffl parsewithweakening(Cat,P0,P,E0,E) :- weaken(Cat,WeakenedCat), parse(WeakenedCat,P0,P,E0,E), Cat=WeakenedCat. ffl Really helps! Ambiguity Packing ffl A parser should not construct all parse trees (exponential) ffl Instead, a compact representation of all such parse trees are constructed -- grammar [42, 9] -- parse forest [76] -- packed structures [3] ffl Here: for every `result item' keep track of the lexical entry and references of other result items that were used to create it ffl Results in a lexicalized tree substitution grammar ffl which generates the input sentence with all its parse trees Bottom-up Inactive-chart Parser Item form: [i;X; j] Axioms: Goals: [0;S;n] Inference Rules: Scan [q i ;wi; qi+1 ] Complete [q k ;X1; q k 0][q k 0;X2; q k 00] : : : [q m0;Xl; qm] [q k ;X0; qm] X0 !X1:::Xl Bottom-up Inactive-chart Parser Inference Rules: Scan [q i ;wi; qi+...

In this paper we will describe ongoing work on an application of Ginzburg's account for short answers in order to improve the nlp component of a spoken dialogue system by using contextual information for disambiguating speech input. 1 Introduction In this paper we will address the question of how to incorporate contextual information for improving the Natural Language Processing (nlp) component of a spoken dialogue system. In the ovis project we are working on a spoken dialogue system for public transport information. Some of the characteristics of most of these types of systems are: 1) The system operates on a very restricted domain, 2) the dialogues are mostly simple and short, 3) The user is mainly restricted to answering system questions, 4) The user might answer with full sentences, but will in practice mostly provide short answers. For the ovis system we developed a grammar that on the one hand covers most important grammatical constructions in Dutch and that on the other han...