An online collaborative platform for the development of empirical grammars

Abstract

Modern science often requires the collaboration of large groups of people and the sharing of specialized data and knowledge. Computational linguistics is not an exception, with projects often involving researchers and data from different parts of the world and different languages. In this document, a tool for internet collaboration in computational linguistics and its development are described. The tool is an online environment that enables users to manage and exploit different types of linguistic resources in a collaborative way. It features real-time editing of documents, visualization of complex objects and data pipelines for numerical and statistical analysis. An extensive HPSG interpreter has been developed at the same time, and is also documented here. It has been embedded in the online tool, and a visual feature structure editor has been included. With their aid, a small grammar of Spanish has been developed, as showcase of the system capabilities. One of these capabilities is the ability to extend the tool with arbitrary user code. In this document an example of this is provided, showing how the system might be used for interlingua or semantic translation.