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<Paper uid="C88-1012">
  <Title>Software Support for Practical Grammar Development</Title>
  <Section position="6" start_page="56" end_page="56" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
4. Collc|usiol~
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The desig, of a software system for grammar development clearly depeuds on 01e linguistic choices for, aud pragmatic requirements of, the NLP task. It is not surprising timt a number of MT efforts, motivated by the need tbr st~bstantial coverage, have implemented their own GOEs. Pethaps file most comprehensive of these is the METAL-SHOP research environment of the METAL MT system (White, 1987), wltich includes facilities for selective viewing of parse trees, tracing of the grammar rules as they are invoked by the parser, and editing the grammar at source. The system makes, and conforms to, a clear-cat distinction between descriptive grammar rules and separate mechanisms for their interpretation, tlowever, since the formal model used is titat of augmented phrase structure grammar which does not undergo auy compilation into object grammar, the fimetionality of the METAL-SHOP GDE, while adequate in the practical context it is used in, remahts below that of the system we describe.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Even though we have worked within a particular theoretical fi'~wuework, thole are genoralisations to be made concerning practical grammar development within the framework of any of the current syntactic thee, ties. In particular, it is important to realise that software support tbr :inch a task does not imply, arm should not be reduced to, tile provision of' a set of computational tools for e.g. gtanlmar editing, inspocting th4; output from a parser, or comfortably interacting with the system..Ln effozt of this scale crucially requi~es critical evaluation of the u,deriylng lingntstle theory, so that the right combination o\[ pragmatically motivated and linguistically correct modifications and revisions is ~bund and implementexl, We are not alone in our findings; our approach to making computational sense of GPSG is similar to the (unimplemenled) plvposals of Shieber (1986b) and Ristad (1987).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The system described above is fully implemented and running on a number of hardware configurations. A wide-coverage grarmnar involving two woman/yeal~ of effort has been developed. A set of programs in Common Lisp, together with a user manual (Carroll et al., 1988) and description of our grammar (Grover et al., 1988) are available through the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute in Edinburgh.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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