<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<Paper uid="W02-0111">
  <Title>Lexicalized Grammar 101</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> This paper is particularly addressed to readers at institutions whose resources and organization rule out extensive formal course-work in natural language processing (NLP). This is typical at universities in North America. In such places, NLP teaching must be ambitious but focused; courses must quickly acquaint a broad range of students to the essential concepts of the field and sell them on its current research opportunities and challenges. This paper presents one resource that may help. Specifically, I outline a simple and versatile lexicalized formalism for natural language syntax, semantics and pragmatics, called TAGLET, and draw on my experience with CS 533 (NLP) at Rutgers to motivate the potential role for TAGLET in a broad NLP class whose emphasis is to introduce topics of current research. Notes, assignments and implementations for TAGLET are available on the web.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> I begin in Section 2 by describing CS 533-situating the course within the university and outlining its topics, audience and goals. I then describe the specific goals for teaching and implementing grammar formalisms within such a course, in Section 3.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Section 4 gives an informal overview of TAGLET, and the algorithms, specifications and assignments that fit TAGLET into a broad general NLP class.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> In brief, TAGLET is a context-free tree-rewriting formalism, defined by the usual complementation operation and the simplest imaginable modification operation. By implementing a strong competence TAGLET parser and generator students simultaneously get experience with central computer science ideas--data structures, unification, recursion and abstraction--and develop an effective starting point for their own subsequent projects. Two noteworthy directions are the construction of interactive applications, where TAGLET's relatively scalable and reversible processing lets students easily explore cutting-edge issues in dialogue semantics and pragmatics, and the development of linguistic specifications, where TAGLET's ability to lexicalize tree-bank parses introduces a modern perspective of linguistic intuitions and annotations as programs. Section 5 briefly summarizes the advantages of TAGLET over the many alternative formalisms that are available; an appendix to the paper provides more extensive technical details.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>