The Design of a Computer Language for Linguistic Information

The Design of a Computer Language for Linguistic Information Stuart M. Shieber Artificial Intelligence Center SRI International and Center for the Study of Language and Information Stanford University Abstract A considerable body of accumulated knowledge about the design of languages for communicating information to computers has been derived from the subfields of program- ming language design and semantics. It has been the goal of the PArR group at SRI to utilize a relevant portion of this knowledge in implementing tools to facilitate communica- tion of linguistic information to computers. The PATR-II formalism is our current computer language for encoding linguistic information. This paper, a brief overview of that formalism, attempts to explicate our design decisions in terms of a set of properties that effective computer lan- guages should incorporate. I. Introduction I The goal of natural-language processing research can be stated quite simply: to endow computers with human language capability. The pursuit of this objective, however, has been a di~cult task for at least two reuons: first, this capability is far from being a well-understood phenomenon; second, the tools for teaching computers what we do know about human language are still very primitive. The solu- tion of these problems lies within the respective domains of linguistics and computer science. Similar problems have arisen previously in computer science. Whenever a new computer application area emerges, there follow new modes of communication with computers that are geared towards such area& Computer languages are a direct result of this need for effective com- munication with computers. A considerable body of accu- mulated knowledge about the design of languages for com- municating information to computers has been derived from the subfields of programming language design and seman- IThis research has been made possible in part by a gift from the Sys- tems Development Foundation, and was also supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency under Contract N00039-80-C- 0575 with the Naval Electronic Systems Command. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the author and should not be interpreted as representative of the official policies, ei- ther expre.,sed or implied, of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or the United States government. The author is indebted to Fernando Pereira, Barbara Grosr. and Ray Perrault for their comments on earlier dra/ts. tics. It has been the goal of the PArR group at SRI 2 to utilize a relevant portion of this knowledge in implementing tools to facilitate communication of linguistic information to computers. The PATR-II formalism is our current computer lan- guage for encoding linguistic information. This paper, a brief overview of that formalism, attempts to explicate our design decisions in terms of a set of properties that effec- tive computer languages should incorporate, namely: sim- plicity, power, mathematical weU-foundedness, flexibility, implementability, modularity, and declarativeness. More extensive discussions of various aspects of the PATR-II for- malism and systems can be found in papers by Shieber et a/., [83], Pereira and Shieber [84] and Karttunen [84]. The notion of designing specialized computer …

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