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<Paper uid="P04-3032">
  <Title>Dyna: A Declarative Language for Implementing Dynamic Programs[?]</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Computational linguistics has become a more experimental science. One often uses real-world data to test one's formal models (grammatical, statistical, or both).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Unfortunately, as in other experimental sciences, testing each new hypothesis requires much tedious lab work: writing and tuning code until parameter estimation (&amp;quot;training&amp;quot;) and inference over unknown variables (&amp;quot;decoding&amp;quot;) are bug-free and tolerably fast. This is intensive work, given complex models or a large search space (as in modern statistical parsing and machine translation). It is a major effort to break into the field with a new system, and modifying existing systems--even in a conceptually simple way--can require significant reengineering.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Such &amp;quot;lab work&amp;quot; mainly consists of reusing or reinventing various dynamic programming architectures. We propose that it is time to jump up a level of abstraction.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> We offer a new programming language, Dyna, that allows one to quickly and easily specify a model's combinatorial structure. We also offer a compiler, dynac, that translates from Dyna into C++ classes. The compiler does all the tedious work of writing the training and decoding code. It is intended to do as good a job as a clever graduate student who already knows the tricks of the trade (and is willing to maintain hand-tuned C++).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> [?] We would like to thank Joshua Goodman, David McAllester, and Paul Ruhlen for useful early discussions, and pioneer users Markus Dreyer, David Smith, and Roy Tromble for their feedback and input. This work was supported by NSF ITR grant IIS-0313193 to the first author, by a Fannie &amp; John Hertz Foundation fellowship to the third author, and by ONR MURI grant N00014-01-1-0685. The views expressed are not necessarily endorsed by the sponsors.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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