Tutorial Description:

The tutorial will provide an introduction to the basic ideas of HPSG, including the representation of valance information, the linking of valance and meaning of a head, the use of type hierarchies for the representation of linguistic knowledge about lexical items and phrase structure rules. A sketch of a state of the art grammar for German will be given, and issues related to universal grammar and multilingual grammar engineering will be touched. The tutorial will address linearization issues that are especially important for languages with free constituent order. To give an example for more complex phenomena, nonlocal dependencies, and complex predicates will be discussed. The argument attraction techniques that have been proposed for analyses of complex predicates in German have proven useful for the description of a lot of other phenomena in other languages.

The participants of the tutorial will gain an insight into the general structure of HPSG grammars and the way linguistic knowledge is represented in HPSG. This knowledge is important for those who want to use these grammars directly, those who want to exploit the knowledge represented by the grammar for different tasks, and those who want to extract information from existing grammars or combine them with other modules that use shallow methods.

Tutorial Speaker:

Stefan Müller (Stefan.Mueller@cl.uni-bremen.de) is working as a senior researcher at the DFKI Lanuage Technology Lab. He delevoped a large scale HPSG grammar for German in the Verbmobil project. From 1994 until 1996 he thaught courses about Prolog and HPSG at the Chair for Computational Linguistics at the Humboldt University Berlin, and from 1997 until now he is teaching courses about HPSG and Theory of Grammar at the Computational Linguistics Departement of the University Saarbrücken.

A short list of recommended reading for those attendees who would like to get a preliminary insight into the topic:

• Books
  • An HPSG grammar for English and the key concepts of HPSG in general are described in:
    • Pollard, Carl J. and Ivan A. Sag, 1987. Information-Based Syntax and Semantics Volume 1 Fundamentals. No. 13 in CSLI Lecture Notes, Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information.
    • Pollard, Carl J. and Ivan A. Sag, 1994. Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. Studies in Contemporary Linguistics, Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press.

  • An HPSG grammar for German is described in:
    • Müller, Stefan, 1999. Deutsche Syntax deklarativ. Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar für das Deutsche. Linguistische Arbeiten, Nr. 394, Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.

• Literature about HPSG in general can be found at:
  • http://www.cl.uni-bremen.de/HPSG-Bib/

• Linearization aspects are discussed in:
  • Mike Reape, 1994. Domain Union and Word Order Variation in German, In Nerbonne, John, Klaus Netter, and Carl J. Pollard (Eds): German in Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. No. 46 in CSLI Lecture Notes, Stanford: CSLI.
  • Andreas Kathol, 2000. Linear Syntax. Oxford University Press

• Several Articles in the Verbmobil-book concern HPSG grammars and their processing:
  • Wolfgang Wahlster (Ed), 2000. Verbmobil: Foundations of Speech-to-Speech Translation, Artificial Intelligence, Berlin, Heidelberg, New York: Springer-Verlag.

• Articles:
  • Flickinger, Daniel P., Stephan Oepen, Hans Uszkoreit, and Jun-ichi Tsuji (Eds), 2000. Natural Language Engeneering, 2000, 6(1). Special Issue on Efficient Processing with HPSG: Methods, Systems, Evaluation
  • Müller, Stefan and Walter Kasper, 2000. HPSG analysis of German. In Wolfgang Wahlster (Ed), 2000.

• Course Material:
  • The Chapter 2 of Complex Predicates: Verbal Complexes, Resultative Constructions, and Particle Verbs in German contains an overview about basic HPSG concepts.
  • Slides (for viewing)
  • Handouts (for printing)
  • References

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