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The Babel-System – An HPSG Fragment for German, a Parser and a Dialog Component

Author: Stefan Müller

Subject Areas: Nontransformational syntax of German, HPSG Implementation, Web-Programming

Title: The Babel-System - An HPSG Fragment for German, a Parser and a Dialog Component

An earlier version of the paper appeared in the proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on the Practical Application of Prolog, London 1996.

The Babel-System is a modularized natural language understanding system written in Prolog. There are modules for

  • morphology
  • parsing (syntactic and semantic analyses)
  • asserting facts and answering questions
  • WWW interface
The system compiles a full form lexicon offline, which is used for parsing.

In the paper, I show the overall architecture of the system and give a short overview of how the parser works. In the grammar, I employ the concept of discontinuous constituents which differs from the standard approach for natural language grammars. Although non-standard parsing techniques are applied the system is in fact more efficient than currently known phrase structure based systems.