Extending the Kahina Debugging Environment by a Feature Workbench for TRALE
Johannes Dellert · 2012
When developing symbolic grammars for natural language processing, with growing grammar size it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain control over the interactions between grammar rules. This thesis strives to develop concepts for facilitating the analysis of such interactions. The new concepts are implemented as tools for the TRALE system, a development environment for typed feature logic which is mainly used for implementing HPSG grammars. After an in-depth discussion of previous approaches to interactive grammar development, a novel concept for displaying context-dependent type information is developed and implemented as a view module for the Kahina graphical debugging environment. In the second half of the thesis, the Kahina environment is extended by a feature structure workbench. This workbench is built around a graphical editor for attribute-value matrices which supports rapid feature structure manipulation by elementary editing operations that preserve the important property of total well-typedness. In a last step, standard operations on feature structures such as unification are made available through the workbench in an interactive fashion, which makes it possible to execute the central steps of parsing processes in isolation. This functionality allows to analyse problematic interactions in a more finegrained and goal-oriented manner than with previous tools.