Performance Grammar

Gerard Kempen and Karin Harbusch

Garrett (1975) identifies two stages of syntactic processing: an early `functional' and a later `positional' stage. This distinction has since been adopted by most students of language production (e.g., see (Bock and Levelt 1994)). Accordingly, we assume that syntactic tree formation in PG is a two-stage process. First, an unordered hierarchical structure (`mobile') is assembled out of lexical building blocks. The key operation at work here is feature unification, which also delimits the positional options of the syntactic constituents. During the second step, the branches of the mobile are temporally arranged by a `read-out' module that realizes one positional option of every constituent.

See the dominance component at work in an e-learning program for German based on PG, called COMPASSII. The user can select words by double click from the lexicon in the left panel in order to drag them into the workspace. Here treelets can be combined by moving a tree to an appropriate footnode. The word order component is not yet online available.

Literature on the formalism, its features and its complexity

• Dutch and German verb constructions in Performance Grammar.
  Gerard Kempen and Karin Harbusch
  In: Pieter A.M. Seuren and Gerard Kempen (eds.), In Verb Constructions in German and Dutch, Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 242, John Benjamins, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2003, pages 185-221.
  
  
• A quantitative model of word order and movement in English, Dutch and German complement constructions
  Karin Harbusch and Gerard Kempen.
  in the Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2002), Taipei, Taiwan, 2002, pp. 328-334.
  
  
• Performance Grammar: A declarative definition.
  Gerard Kempen and Karin Harbusch
  in Mariët Theune, Anton Nijholt, and Hendri Hondorp (eds.), Computational Linguistics in the Netherlands 2001. Rodopi, Amsterdam/The Netherlands, 2002, pages 148-162.
  
  
• Complexity of Linear Ordering in Performance Grammar, TAG and HPSG
  Karin Harbusch and Gerard Kempen
  in the Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammars and Related Formalisms, Paris/France, 2000.
  
  
• A uniform topological model of clause linearization in Dutch, English and German.
  Gerard Kempen and Karin Harbusch
  manuscript.
  
  

Literature on applications based on the formalism

• Computing Accurate Grammatical Feedback in a Virtual Writing Conference for German-Speaking Elementary-School Children: An Approach Based on Natural Language Generation.
  Karin Harbusch, Gergana Itsova, Ulrich Koch and Christine Kühner
  In: CALICO Journal, Vol. 20, No. 3, May 2009, pages 626-643.
  
  
• A natural-language paraphrase generator for on-line monitoring and commenting incremental sentence construction by L2 learners of German
  Karin Harbusch, Gerard Kempen, and Theo Vosse
  in the Proceedings of the WorldCALL 2008: Bridging the World through Technology Enhanced Language Learning, Fukuoka, Japan, 2008.
  
  
• The Sentence Fairy: A natural-language generation system to support children's essay writing.
  Karin Harbusch, Gergana Itsova, Ulrich Koch and Christine Kühner
  In: Computer Assisted Language Learning, Vol. 21, No. 4, October 2008, pages 339-352.
  
  
• "The Sentence Fairy": NLP techniques in support of essay writing by German-speaking elementary schoolers
  Karin Harbusch, Ulrich Koch, Christine Kühner, Gergana Itsova, and Camiel van Breugel
  in the Proceedings of the iicall2 2007: Interfaces of Intelligent Computer-Assisted Language Learning, Waterloo, Canada, 2007.
  
  
• Interactive sentence combining and paraphrasing in support of integrated writing and grammar instruction: A new application area for natural language sentence generators
  Karin Harbusch, Camiel van Breugel, Ulrich Koch, and Gerard Kempen
  in the Proceedings of the 11th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation (ENLG 2007), Dagstuhl, 2007.
  
  
• A generation-oriented workbench for Performance Grammar: Capturing linear order variability in German and Dutch.
  Karin Harbusch, Gerard Kempen, Camiel van Breugel, and Ulrich Koch
  in the Proceedings of the Fourth International Natural Language Generation Conference, Sydney, Australia, July 2006, pp. 9-11.
  
  

For freely available JAVA-implementations of a parser and a generator, respectively, contact one of the authors.