Portability

[maxwell]

On Fri, 19 Mar 2010 23:35:51 +0100, Stefan Müller
<Stefan.Mueller at fu-berlin.de> wrote:
> As for porting: Dan's and my experience is that it is healthy to start
> over from time to time. 

I have a hidden agenda, which I will now reveal :-).  I am concerned with
language documentation, in which I (or some other linguist) will be the
only linguist available to work on some language for the foreseeable
future.  So I want something that will preserve my grammar for a long time,
both as a descriptive (human readable) grammar and as a formal
(computer-processable) grammar.

If I were a new-fangled computational linguist, I would of course create a
treebank of the language instead, and rely on machine learning to turn that
into a parser.  But being a rather Olde computational linguist, I happen to
like grammar writing...  And to be honest, most of my work is in
morphology, where hand-crafted grammars of morphologically complex
languages are still fairly common.  But I wanted to hear how syntacticians
felt about this.
 
> The [incr TSDB()] manual says on page 37 that Stephan will help with the
> installation, provided there is a beach near your institution.

I don't suppose he would be interested in working on Pashto... or Inuit,
for that matter.

> Independent of all this I think that developers should document their
> grammars so that the knowledge and expertise is preserved for the
> future. Then the respective grammars can be taken and be implemented in
> whatever system is available then. 

I agree, and this takes me back to my agenda: blending descriptive and
formal grammars into a single document.

> But according to Bob
> Carpenter, it took just three weeks to implement the grammar in the
> appendix of PS94.

Unfortunately, I'm not Bob Carpenter...

> So if we have a precise description of seven years work with pencil and
> paper or with the computer, we can reuse it and the achievement is there
> independently of specific hardware.

My experience is that few descriptive grammars are sufficiently precise
and unambiguous for that.  Nor, if they haven't been tested
computationally, are they that accurate.

   Mike Maxwell