Open Soucre Graph Transducer Interpreter and Grammar Development Environment

AbstractGraph and tree transducers have been applied in many NLP areas―among them, machine translation, summarization, parsing, and text generation. In particular, the successful use of tree rewriting transducers for the introduction of syntactic structures in statistical machine translation contributed to their popularity. However, the potential of such transducers is limited because they do not handle graphs and because they ”consume” the source structure in that they rewrite it instead of leaving it intact for intermediate consultations. In this paper, we describe an open source tree and graph transducer interpreter, which combines the advantages of graph transducers and two-tape Finite State Transducers and surpasses the limitations of state-of-the-art tree rewriting transducers. Along with the transducer, we present a graph grammar development environment that supports the compilation and maintenance of graph transducer grammatical and lexical resources. Such an environment is indispensable for any effort to create consistent large coverage NLP-resources by human experts.