Multi-purpose development and operation environments for natural language applications

Abstract

Interactive user environments have been a central efficiencyenhancing feature of many modem computer applications, including natural language processing. There are two major classes of users for whom NLP environments can be constructed developers and end users, such as technical writers and translators. Developers need help in the various knowledge acquisition tasks, such as dictionary and grammar writing for NLP applications. End users look for efficiency enhancements in document preparation beyond the level of word processing support. There are two approaches to the solution of this problem. A dedicated workstation can be developed for each of the required functionalities. Alternatively, workstations can be configured as sets of application routines attached to a universal user interface. In this report we describe a general-purpose user environment, under development at the Center for Machine Translation of Carnegie Mellon University, capable of supporting a number of dedicated workstation configurations. Among the types of end users whom this system will benefit are technical writers, text revisors and translators. In the framework of NLP system development this tool supports dictionary and ontology acquisition. A number of separate functionalities included in this system have been developed and used either in commercial word processing software packages or in NLP projects (e.g., the translator's tools described in Macklovitch, 1989, ; and the developer environments IRACQ (Ayuso et al., 1987), LUKE (Wrobiewski and Rich, 1988) or ONTOS (Monarch and Nirenburg, 1989), among many others). Our system allows a merge of the two directions in the tool development. One direct reason to put the two previously separate kinds of functionality into a single system was to support the knowledge-based machineaided translation environment which involves an interactive human editor who uses an interface to help the machine understand the source text. A standard Unixand X-windows-based workstation platform has been selected for our system, whose working name is Tws, for Translator's Workstation. We also used the C-based X11 toolkit called MOTIF (Motif, 1991) and its CommonLisp interface called CLM (Babatz et. al., 1991). In practice, TWS consists of a number of application (functionality) modules which are integrated through the central MOTIF-based user interface module. For reasons of uniformity, each of the applications uses the facilities of the user interface for display and input. Each module uses a standard window to interact with the user, and each window has standard menus which, among other functionalities, allow the user to invoke any other module. Each module also has special menus. The architecture of TWS is presented in Figure 1.