Search

This article provides an overview of the dissemination work carried out in META-NET from 2010 until early 2014; we describe its impact on the regional, national and international level, mainly with regard to politics and the situation of funding for LT topics. This paper documents the initiative’s work throughout Europe in order to boost progress and innovation in our field.

This article provides an overview of the dissemination work carried out in META-NET from 2010 until early 2014; we describe its impact on the regional, national and international level, mainly with regard to politics and the situation of funding for LT topics. This paper documents the initiative’s work throughout Europe in order to boost progress and innovation in our field.

In the context of the European Network of Excellence in Computational Logic (CoLogNet, http://www.colognet.org/), the European Association for Logic, Language and Computation (FoLLI, http://www.folli.org) has started a project on E-Learning in Computational Logic and the development of Dynamic Teaching Materials for its annual European Summer Schools (ESSLLIs). The project has a double aim: (i) to enhance the (re)usability of existing ESSLLI teaching materials by creating a richly structured repository; and (ii) to develop dynamic teaching materials for the upcoming ESSLLIs, integrating textual presentation, exercises, and computational tools (theorem provers, parsers) into a user-centered "living book". This paper presents the background of the project, gives some brief information about ESSLLI and describes the two subtasks in which the project is divided.

Grammars of natural language are highly complex objects. This complexity is reflected in formal analyses found in both syntactic theory and computational grammars. In particular, there are two factors that make it notoriously difficult to make strong assertions about analyses for natural language grammars. First, syntactic phenomena interact and therefore also their analyses interact. Second, typically more than one formal analysis can account for a given phenomenon. Grammar engineering is an incremental process. A syntactician or grammar engineer often needs to choose between analyses without conclusive evidence as to which analysis works best. Because analyses interact, this decision will affect possible analyses for phenomena handled in the future. This thesis proposes to store analyses in a metagrammar allowing grammar writers to maintain alternative analyses until enough evidence is found to make a choice. The approach is evaluated by comparing alternative analyses for auxiliaries and word order in German. Additionally, possibilities of using the approach for multilingual grammar engineering are examined. The results of these evaluations indicate that the proposed methodology provides a platform for a more systematic approach for grammar engineering. The approach furthermore improves modularity offering possibilities for parallel grammar development for multiple (related) languages.