The importance of being lazy -- using lazy evaluation to process queries to HPSG grammars

Abstract

Linguistic theories formulated in the architecture of {\sc hpsg} can be very precise and explicit since {\sc hpsg} provides a formally well-defined setup. However, when querying a faithful implementation of such an explicit theory, the large data structures specified can make it hard to see the relevant aspects of the reply given by the system. Furthermore, the system spends much time applying constraints which can never fail just to be able to enumerate specific answers. In this paper we want to describe lazy evaluation as the result of an off-line compilation technique. This method of evaluation can be used to answer queries to an {\sc hpsg} system so that only the relevant aspects are checked and output.