Type Description Language

Abstract: Type Description Language (TDL) is provided which is an extensible markup language (XML) based language that provides an interface description that makes the mapping between an interface specification and its wire format deterministic and simple. TDL provides seamless bridging between XML and object based views in a distributed environment. TDL leverages the duality between the type-based (objects) and XML-based views and may be used for exchanging metadata between various kinds of type (object) systems, such as Component Object Model (COM), Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA), Common Language Runtime (CLR), etc. In this regard, TDL proposes a new syntax for representing the behavior aspect of a type and illustrates that there is a one to one mapping from an abstract type to a schema type and vice-versa.

Abstract: This documentation serves as a user's guide to the type description language TDL which is employed in natural language projects at the DFKI. It is intended as a guide for grammar writers rather than as a comprehensive internal documentation. Some familiarity with grammar formalisms/theories such as Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) is assumed. The manual describes the syntax of the TDL formalism, the user-accessible control functions and variables, and the various tools such as type grapher, feature editor, TDL2LATEX, Emacs TDL mode, and print interface.

Abstract: In this paper, we present a modeling of a syntactic lexicon for Arabic verbs. The structure of the lexicon is based on the recently introduced ISO standard called the Lexical Markup Framework. This standard enables us to describe the lexical information in a versatile way using general guidelines and make possible to share the resources developed in compliance with it. We discuss the syntactic information associated to verbs and the model we propose to structure and represent the entries within the lexicon. To study the usability of the lexicon in a real application, we designed a rule-based system that translates a LMF syntactic resource into Type Description Language compliant resource. The rules are mapping information from LMF entries and types to TDL types. The generated lexicon is used as input for a previously written HPSG grammar for Arabic built within the Language Knowledge Builder platform. Finally, we discuss improvements in parsing results and possible perspectives of this work.

Abstract: The paper proposes a treatment of relative sentences within the framework of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). Relative sentences are considered as a rather delicate linguistic phenomenon and not explored enough by Arabic researchers. In an attempt to deal with this phenomenon, we propose in this paper a study about different forms of relative clauses and the interaction of relatives with other linguistic phenomena such as ellipsis and coordination. In addition, in this paper we shed light on the recursion in Arabic relative sentences which makes this phenomenon more delicate in its treatment. This study will be used for the construction of an HPSG grammar that can process relative sentences. The HPSG formalism is based on two fundamental components: features and AVM (AttributeValue-Matrix). In fact, an adaptation of HPSG for the Arabic language is made here in order to integrate features and rules of the Arabic language. The established HPSG grammar is specified in TDL (Type Description Language). This specification is used by the LKB platform (Linguistic Knowledge Building) in order to generate the parser.