The Treehouse presents:

Antske Fokkens, U Saarlandes

November 12, 2010 12:30-1:20 pm

Using Grammar Customization for Analysis Comparison

For most syntactic phenomena, more than one solution exists to capture them within syntactic theory. Interaction with other phenomena and observations from other languages are used to determine what the optimal solution might be. The problem is that investigating the interaction with other phenomena often remains limited to the interaction of the chosen solution for the particular phenomenon. This leads to a risk of choices made at the beginning of designing a grammar (either for linguistic research or for grammar engineering) having too much impact on choices to come.

Even though implementing grammars can provide a good platform to compare alternative analyses, as argued in Bender (2008), it is practically unfeasible to go back and compare alternative analyses with all possible hypothesis considered in the past. In this talk, I will discuss the possibilities to use the set-up of the LinGO grammar customization system (Bender et al. 2010) to facilitate the comparison of multiple analyses.