Automatic Syntax Checking

Abstract

A correct translation includes the correct construction of phrases. Obviously, the knowledge involved in this task is very complex. A great deal of the efforts in learning a language must be devoted to syntactic properties like admissible complements of words, word order, inflection and agreement. The opportunities for making mistakes are as many as the number of appropriate syntactic constructions. Therefore a tool for assessing the syntactic correctness of a translation is a very desirable module of the Translator’s Workbench. Such a module is under development at the Institute for Computational Linguistics of the University of Heidelberg¹. The present work relies on basic research conducted in the framework of the PLAIN system (Programs for Language Analysis and INference) starting in the mid-1970s.² The linguistic theory underlying the application is Dependency Unification Grammar (DUG).³