Core Technology
SProUT is built on top of three core components: a finite-state machine toolkit for building, combining and optimizing various types of finite-state devices, a flexible XML-based regular compiler for converting regular patterns into their corresponding compressed finite-state representation and the JTFS package which provides standard operations for constructing and manipulating TFSs, e.g., unification.
The finite-state toolkit and the corresponding regular compiler are described in detail in the following publications:
J. Piskorski. DFKI Finite-State Machine Toolkit. Research Report RR-02-04, DFKI GmbH, Saarbruecken, Germany, 2002. [BibTeX]
J. Piskorski, W. Drozdzynski, F. Xu, O. Scherf. A Flexible XML-based Regular Compiler for Creation and Conversion of Linguistic Resources. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Language Resources an Evaluation (LREC) 2002, Las Palmas, Spain, 2002. [BibTeX]
The following papers describe TDL, a description language for typed feature structures, its formal properties and implementation details as well as its application in the HPSG grammar formalism context. A subset of TDL, augmented by rule syntax and regular expressions on the left hand side of rules, forms the basis for XTDL, the syntax for SProUT rules.
H-U. Krieger, U. Schäfer. TDL--A Type Description Language for Constraint-Based Grammars. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, COLING-94, 893--899, 1994. [BibTeX]
H-U. Krieger, U. Schäfer. Efficient Parameterizable Type Expansion for Typed Feature Formalisms. In Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-95, 1428--1434, 1995. [BibTeX]
H-U. Krieger, U. Schäfer. TDL - A Type Description Language for HPSG. Part 1: Overview. DFKI Research report RR-94-37, DFKI, Saarbrücken, 1994. [BibTeX]
H-U. Krieger, U. Schäfer. TDL - A Type Description Language for HPSG. Part 2: User Guide DFKI Research report RR-94-14, DFKI, Saarbrücken, 1994. [BibTeX]
The following book describes SProUT in the context of deep and shallow NLP component integration architectures (Chapters 7 and 9).
U. Schäfer Integrating Deep and Shallow Natural Language Processing Components - Representations and Hybrid Architectures. Doctoral Dissertation. Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany, 2007. Also as Vol. 22 of the Saarbrücken Dissertation Series in Computational Linguistics and Language Technology. [BibTeX]
Details concerning FLOP - a tool for compiling type hierarchies defined in TDL-like format can be found in the following publications.
U. Callmeier. Efficient parsing with large-scale unification grammars. Master thesis, Computer Science Department of the Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany, 2001. [BibTeX]
U. Callmeier. PET - A Platform for Experimentation with Efficient HPSG Processing Techniques. In Natural Language Engineering, Volume 6, Number 1, 2000, pages 99-108. [BibTeX]