A Comparison of ALE and PATR: Practical Experiences
Milena Stefano, Wilco ter Stal · University of Twente Research Information · 1993
We describe our experiences with two unificationbased grammar formalisms, namely ALE and PATR, used for syntactic and semantic analysis of NL texts. These formalisms can be considered to be high-level tools, like expert-system shells, for writing a NL grammar and for parsing sentences. However there are a number of aspects, such as ease of expression, augmentability, linguistic felicitousness and computational efficiency in which ALE and PATR differ. The experiment is carried out in the context of the Plinius project which requires a.o. a large sublanguage grammar covering a fragment of English. We will describe the formalization and implementation of our linguistic ideas in PATR and ALE. Subsequently we will evaluate both exercises ihereby focusing on both practical and theoretical properties of the two formalisms. The purpose of the experiment is to reveal whether there are motivated reasons concerning which kind of formalism can be employed best given the particular Plinius task.