On Implementing an HPSG theory -- Aspects of the logical architecture, the formalization, and the implementation of head-driven phrase structure grammars

Abstract

The paper presents some aspects involved in the formalization and implementation of HPSG theories. As basis, the logical setups of Carpenter (1992) and King (1989, 1994) are briefly compared regarding their usefulness as basis for HPSGII (Pollard and Sag 1994). The possibilities for expressing HPSG theories in the HPSGII architecture and in various computational systems (ALE, Troll, CUF, and TFS) are discussed. Beside a formal characterization of the possibilities, the paper investigates the specific choices for constraints with certain linguistic motivations, i.e. the lexicon, structure licencing, and grammatical principles. An ALE implementation of a theory for German proposed by Hinrichs and Nakazawa (1994) is used as example and the ALE grammar is included in the appendix.