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<Paper uid="P04-3008">
  <Title>Interactive grammar development with WCDG</Title>
  <Section position="6" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
5 Conclusions
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> We demonstrate a tool that lets the user parse, display and manipulate dependency structures according to a variant of dependency grammar in a graphical environment. We have found such an integrated environment invaluable for the development of precise and large grammars of natural language.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Compared to other approaches, c.f. (Kaplan and Maxwell, 1996), the built-in WCDG parser provides a much better feedback by pinpointing possible reasons for the current grammar being unable to produce the desired parsing result. This additional information can then be immediately used in subsequent development cycles.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> A similar tool, called Annotate, has been described in (Brants and Plaehn, 2000). This tool facilitates syntactic corpus annotation in a semi-automatic way by using a part-of-speech tagger and a parser running in the background. In comparison, Annotate is primarily used for corpus annotation, whereas XCDG supports the development of the parser itself also.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Due to its ability to always compute the single best analysis of a sentence and to highlight possible shortcomings of the grammar, the XCDG system provides a useful framework in which human design decisions on rules and weights can be effectively combined with a corpus-driven evaluation of their consequences. An alternative for a symbiotic cooperation in grammar development has been devised by (Hockenmaier and Steedman, 2002), where a skeleton of fairly general rule schemata is instantiated and weighed by means of a treebank annotation. Although the resulting grammar produced highly competitive results, it nevertheless requires a treebank being given in advance, while our approach also supports a simultaneous treebank compilation. null</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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