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A diagnostic tool for German syntax

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Abstract

In this paper we describe an ongoing effort to construct a catalogue of syntactic data exemplifying the major syntactic patterns of German. The purpose of the corpus is to support the diagnosis of errors in the syntactic components of natural language processing (NLP) systems. Secondary aims are the evaluation of NLP syntax components and support of theoretical and empirical work on German syntax.

The data consist of artificially and systematically constructed expressions, including also negative (ungrammatical) examples. The data are organized into a relational database and annotated with some basic information about the phenomena illustrated and the internal structure of the sample sentences. The organization of the data supports selected systematic testing of specific areas of syntax, but also serves the purpose of a linguistic database.

The paper first gives some general motivation for the necessity of syntactic precision in some areas of NLP and discusses the potential contribution of a syntactic database to the field of component evaluation. The second part of the paper describes the set up and control methods applied in the construction of the sentence suite and annotations to the examples. We illustrate the approach with examples from verbal government and sentential coordination. This section also contains a description of the abstract data model, the design of the database and the query language used to access the data. The final sections compare our work to existing approaches and sketch some future extensions.

We invite other research groups to participate in our effort, so that the diagnostics tool can eventually become public domain. Several groups have already accepted this invitation, and progress is being made.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Alfa Informatica, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, Postbus 716, Oude Kijk in 't Jatstraat 41, NL 9700 AS, Groningen, Netherlands

    John Nerbonne

  2. Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz, GmbH, Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3, D-6600, Saarbrücken 11, FRG

    Klaus Netter, Abdel Kader Diagne & Judith Klein

  3. Institute für Computerlinguistik, Universit:at des Saarlandes Im Stadtwald, D-6600, Saarbrücken 11, FRG

    Ludwig Dickmann

Authors
  1. John Nerbonne
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  2. Klaus Netter
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  3. Abdel Kader Diagne
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  4. Judith Klein
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  5. Ludwig Dickmann
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Additional information

This work was supported by a research grant, ITW 9002 0, from the German Bundesministerium für Forschung und Technologie to the DFKI project DISCO and by IBM Germany through the project LILOG-SB conducted at the University of Saarbrücken. These projects are led by Hans Uszkoreit. We are grateful to Andrew White, Trinity College, Dublin, and Francesco Infantino and Claudio Piorenza, both of Universiteta di Bari, for support programming in the context of student projects.

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Nerbonne, J., Netter, K., Diagne, A.K. et al. A diagnostic tool for German syntax. Mach Translat 8, 85–107 (1993). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00981246

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