Experiences with the GTU grammar development environment

Abstract

In this paper we describe our experiences with a tool for the development and testing of natural language grammars called GTU (German: Grammatik-Testumgebung; grammar test environment). GTU supports four grammar formalisms under a window-oriented user interface. Additionally, it contains a set of German test sentences covering various syntactic phenomena as well as three types of German lexicons that can be attached to a grammar via an integrated lexicon interface. What follows is a description of the experiences we gained when we used GTU as a tutoring tool for students and as an experimental tool for CL researchers. From these we will derive the features necessary for a future grammar workbench.