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What and Who

AMALIA -- Abstract MAchine for LInguistic Applications

Dr. Shuly Wintner, Nissim Francez
DFKI-Kolloquium
AG 1, AG 2  
AG Audience
English

Date, Time and Location

Tuesday, 18 November 97
11:00
60 Minutes
43.1 - DFKI
Turing Saal
Saarbrücken

Abstract

Contemporary linguistic formalisms such as LFG or HPSG have become so
rigorous that it is now possible to view them as very high level
declarative programming languages. Consequently, grammars for natural
languages can be viewed as programs; this view enables the application
of various methods and techniques that were proved useful for
programming languages to the domain of natural languages. This work
introduces such an application: an implementation technique that is
common for logic programming languages, namely the use of an abstract
machine, is applied to (a subset of) the ALE formalism, originally
designed for specifying feature-structure based phrase-structure
grammars.


We present Amalia (Abstract MAchine for LInguistic Applications), an
abstract machine specifically tailored for processing ALE grammars. It
is composed of data structures and a set of instructions, augmented by
a compiler from the grammatical formalism to the abstract instructions,
and a (portable) interpreter of the abstract instructions. The effect
of each instruction is defined using a low-level language that can be
executed on ordinary hardware. Execution of the compiled code amounts
to parsing with respect to the original grammar. A variant of the
compiler produces code for generation.


The advantages of the abstract machine approach are twofold. From a
theoretical point of view, the abstract machine gives a well-defined
operational semantics to the grammatical formalism. From a practical
point of view, Amalia is the first system that employs a direct
compilation scheme for unification grammars that are based on typed
feature structures. The use of Amalia results in a much improved
performance over existing systems.

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