[Corpora-List] Survey: applications using grammar-based parsers

[Mike Maxwell]

Michael Piotrowski wrote:
> Unfortunately, it seems that when you do not just want the performance
> numbers (cited in papers) but the actual, working system, it frequently
> turns out that it is not available (dead project, results locked away,
> commercial, etc.) or unusable in an application (too slow, not
> embeddable, etc.).  At least our experience wrt. morphologic analysis
> and generation for German has been quite sobering.

Michael (the poster cited above, not me :-)) brings up an important 
point--or at least it's one I've been harping on for several years now. 
  A lot of work goes into a parser (the ones we've looked at have all 
been morphological parsers), and five or ten years later the parser is 
no longer available, or if it is available, it won't run because the 
software it runs on has been changed from underneath it.  (I once worked 
on a project where two of the three programming language implementations 
we used were obsolete or defunct before the project even finished.)

There's probably not much that can be done about the commercial case 
that Michael mentions.  But something can be done about the 'dead 
project' and 'results locked away' issue, as well as the software 
obsolescence issue.  Open sourcing is part of the solution, but IMO only 
part.

Anyway, I would appreciate hearing stories about this kind of 
problem--or pointers to papers that mention the problem.  Write to me 
and I can summarize, or if it's of general interest, post to the list.
-- 
    Michael Maxwell
    What good is a universe without somebody around to look at it?
    --Robert Dicke, Princeton physicist

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