Eckhard Bick - VISL

7
The applicational level:
Teaching and translating on the internet
At http://ling.hum.au.dk and http://visl.hum.sdu.dk (current) an integrated interactive
user interface is presented for the automatic analysis of running Portuguese text and
for teaching grammatical analysis through the Internet medium. Though the system's
internal grammatical tools - for reasons of robustness, efficiency and correctness - are
based on the Constraint Grammar formalism, users are free - at the applicational level
- to choose from a variety of notational filters, supporting different descriptional
paradigms. The original kernel of programs was built around the multi-level parser for
Portuguese described in this text. A similar system has since been implemented for
English and Spanish as part of the ongoing VISL-project at Odense University.
7.1 Progressive Level Parsing as a real time tool on
the Internet
One obvious application of a Constraint Grammar based parser is as a real time tool:
The technique is so robust and fast that “live” analysis is possible, and so error-free that
post-editing becomes dependable for many purposes. Once started, the parsing
programs handle text at many times reading speed (hundreds or thousands of words per
second, depending on the level of analysis), which is an important condition for
applications where the parser is to be integrated in other programs, for instance text
processors with spelling checkers, search engines or grammar-tutors. Real-time
performance also allows internet-applications, and as a first step, I have made the
different parsing stages themselves (as described in chapter 1) available on the internet.
Full morphological analysis, disambiguated PoS-tagging, syntactic flat dependency
parsing, tree structure parsing, and bilingually oriented semantic disambiguation can
thus be run individually:
• Morf - all morphological possibilities (preprocessor, lexicon and analyser)
• Pars - disambiguated morphosyntactic analysis (Constraint Grammar)
• TradBase - disambiguated morphosyntactic analysis plus base form translation
• TradText - running translation into Danish
• FlatMorf - running word class colour notation
• FlatSyn - running word class colour notation with syntactic indexing
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