DelphinLingo

The LinGO (Linguistic Grammars Online) Laboratory at the Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI) is committed to the development of linguistically precise grammars based on the HPSG framework, and general-purpose tools for use in grammar engineering, profiling, parsing and generation. Early work in the LinGO Lab focused on the construction of a general-purpose grammar of English in the form of the English Resource Grammar (or ERG), and on further development of the LKB (LkbTop) grammar engineering system. The LKB was also used at CSLI as the testbed for a number of teaching grammars and smaller-scale grammars for other languages including Japanese and Spanish. Early development of the ERG was carried out as part of the Verbmobil machine translation project, as well as in a National Science Foundation project on computer-aided speech generation for people who cannot speak because of disability. The LinGO Laboratory also gave rise to the development of Minimal Recursion Semantics (MRS), a semantic representation language employed in many Delph-in systems.

The ERG has been used in research on multiword expressions (MWEs) jointly funded by the NSF and NTT Communication Science Laboratories, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation, and the ERG was also extended for use in hybrid information extraction as part of the Deep Thought project. It is currently being used and further developed in a project funded by NTT to extract ontological information from dictionaries, by parsing dictionary definitions to produce MRS representations as the basis for extraction rules. The ERG is also being deployed in the construction of a novel, rich and dynamic treebank for HPSG, the LinGO Redwoods (RedwoodsTop) initiative. It is also being used for generation (realization) within the LOGON Norwegian-English machine translation project.

We are separately bringing together our grammar writing experience across a variety of languages in devising a Grammar Matrix to aid in the development of broad-coverage, precision, implemented grammars for natural languages.