Current projects
BulTreeBank
SFB 441, A5
MiLCA, A4

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For over a decade the linguistics department SfS has been the home to a number of HPSG research projects. At present, alongside smaller projects, there are three long term projects with extensive, independent objectives, and one project which is in its initial phases.

BulTreeBank is a collaborative project of the research group with Kiril Simov at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in Sofia and the computational linguistics group at the SfS. The objective of BulTreeBank is to create a large treebank of HPSG-type annotated Bulgarian sentences, to develop further Bulgarian corpora. Within the framework of this project, we plan to construct two grammars: an HPSG grammar of Bulgarian and a grammar suitable for partial parsing. Additionally, BulTreeBank is developing XML-based software for work with treebanks. There is a an active exchange between the academic communities of the SfS and the Bulgarian Academy of sciences.

The project, Grammar Formalisms and Parsing falls within the scope of federal consortium's Media Intensive Instructive Modules in Computer Linguistic Education, otherwise known under its anagram of MiLCA, which is funded by the Federal Ministry for Education and Research under the umbrella of the Federal Program "Neue Medien in der Bildung" (New Media in Education). Its origin in this consortium lends the nickname of this project, MiLCA (sub-project) A4. The goal of the MilCA project A4 is to design a web-based course on HPSG, bridging the gap between the topics of linguistic theory formation, mathematical foundations of feature-based grammar and constraint-based parsing. This course is being developed in three locations. In addition to the Linguistics department in Tübingen, both Detmar Meurers from the Ohio State University in Columbus (USA) and Gerald Penn from the University of Toronto (Canada) are contributing to the development of the course.

The Project A5 in Tübingen Special Research Program (Sonderforschungsbereich) 441 is devoted to the subject of (as it is called) distributional idiosyncrasies, from the viewpoint of their corpus linguistic occurrences and grammar theoretical meaning. Simply said, this research identifies and characterizes linguistic signs which have specific requirements on the context of their occurrences, through work with corpora as well as methods of theoretical linguistics. There is a need to examine the special characteristics of these signs more closely since they are traditionally neglected in the context of universal and formally set up grammar theories. Yet a study of these signs and their characteristics is essential for a realistic, overall picture of language. On the basis of the empirical data acquired in the project, grammatical theories will be examined with regard to their suitability in describing distributional idiosyncrasies. Our findings on distributional idiosyncrasies will then be integrated into a corresponding theory in HPSG. In doing this, we expect important impulses for the architecture of HPSG grammars, as well as for their computational implementation.

As of July 2002, a project, which Frank Richter and Manfred Sailer in Tübingen and Gerald Penn from the University of Toronto are participating in, will be funded by the Strukturfond at the University of Tübingen for the next year. The project explores the specification and efficient implementation of a semantic representation language in constraint-based grammar formalisms, appropriate for empirically and theoretically interesting questions. The long term goal of this project is to syntactically integrate a very expressive semantic theory in the TRALE implementation platform for HPSG grammars, using suited programming techniques.

Last modified: 11.09.2002