Descriptive Language as a Linguistic Tool

In developing a natural languages processing system, the linguist needs to transfer a large amount of linguistic knowledge into the system. Therefore, the transferring ~d the maintaining of the linguistic. knowledge in a working system become a crucial issue. If the linguist transfers the linguistic knowledge indirectly through the computer engineer, the productivity of both the linguist and the computer engineer might be lowered. So it is better for the linguist to transfer the knowledge directly into the system. In this paper, we propose a descriptive language that is tailored specifically for direct transferring and maintaining of the linguistic knowledge needed in our system by our linguists. We will also discuss the criterions for designing the descriptive language and the design experiences gained from a completed descriptive language and its environment. In addition to offering a simple and· direct way to express linguistic knowledge, descriptive language unifies the knowledge into a clear and definite form. As a direct consequence, it is easier to build an environment that can maintain the global knowledge consistency. needed in a natural language processing system.