Guido Minnen, Dale Gerdemann

Direct Automated Inversion of Logic Grammars


Arbeitspapiere des SFB 340, Bericht Nr. 35 (1993), 69pp.
Postscript (413kb) 1-up; Postscript gzip-komprimiert (113kb) 1-up.

Abstract

Reversibility of logic grammars in natural language processing is desirable for both theoretical and practical reasons. This report addresses this topic in describing a new approach to automated inversion of logic grammars: the Direct Inversion approach (DIA). A logic grammar is inverted by automatically altering the order of literals in the grammar and reformulating certain recursive procedures at compile time. The inversion process results in a new executable grammar, which is evaluated top-down and left-to-right (using a standard Prolog interpreter), but not left-to-right with respect to the original grammar. The DIA improves upon related approaches not only in being fully automated and computationally tractable, but also with respect to the class of grammars it is able to invert and the performance of the new executable grammar produced.
Seminar für Sprachwissenschaft
Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen
Wilhelmstrasse 113
72074 Tübingen
Germany