Thilo Götz and W. Detmar Meurers
To appear in: Gert Webelhuth, Jean-Pierre Koenig, and Andreas Kathol (eds.): ``Lexical and Constructional Aspects of Linguistic Explanation''. CSLI. 1998.
Linguistic theories formulated in the architecture of HPSG can be very precise and explicit since HPSG provides a formally well-defined setup. However, when querying a faithful implementation of such an explicit theory, the large data structures specified can make it hard to see the relevant aspects of the reply given by the system. Furthermore, the system spends much time applying constraints which can never fail just to be able to enumerate specific answers. In this paper we want to describe lazy evaluation as the result of an off-line compilation technique. This method of evaluation can be used to answer queries to a HPSG system so that only the relevant aspects are checked and output. We first describe three different ways to check grammaticality. Then, we introduce our lazy compilation method and compare it to a more standard compilation. Finally, we examine the theoretical properties of our approach.
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Bibtex entry:
@incollection{Goetz:Meurers:98,
author = {Thilo G\"otz and Walt Detmar Meurers},
title = {The importance of being lazy - {U}sing lazy evaluation to
process queries to {HPSG} grammars},
booktitle = {Lexical and Constructional Aspects of Linguistic
Explanation},
editor = {Gert Webelhuth and Jean-Pierre Koenig and Andreas Kathol},
publisher = {CSLI},
address = {Stanford},
year = {1998}
}