A Tuneable Performance Grammar

Abstract

This paper describes a tuneable performance grammar currently being developed for speech understanding. It shows how attributes of words are defined and propagated to successively larger phrases, how other attributes are acquired, how “factors’’ reference them to help the parser choose among competing definitions in order to interpret the utterance correctly, and how these factors can easily be changed to adapt the grammar to other discourses and contexts. Factors that might be classified as “syntactic’’ are emphasized, but the attributes they reference need not be, and seldom are, purely syntactic.