CSLI LinGO Lab

This page provides information about the CSLI Linguistic Grammars Online (LinGO) Lab at Stanford University.

The CSLI LinGO Lab is committed to the development of linguistically precise grammars based on the HPSG framework, and general-purpose tools for use in grammar engineering, profiling, parsing and generation. Early work in the CSLI LinGO Lab focused on the construction of a general-purpose grammar of English in the form of the English Resource Grammar (or ERG), and on further development of the LKB grammar engineering system. The LKB was also used at CSLI as the testbed for a number of teaching grammars and smaller-scale grammars for other languages including Japanese and Spanish.

The ERG is the cornerstone of ongoing research on multiword expressions (MWEs) jointly funded by the NSF and NTT Communication Science Laboratories, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation. It is also being deployed in the construction of a novel, rich and dynamic treebank for HPSG, the LinGO Redwoods initiative. We are separately bringing together our grammar writing experience across a variety of languages in devising a Grammar Matrix to aid in the development of broad-coverage, precision, implemented grammars for natural languages.

The CSLI LinGO Lab is one of the founding members of the international Deep Linguistic Processing with HPSG Initiative (DELPH-IN), a network of academic and commercial research institutions that target applications of precise, linguistic NLP. HPSG and Minimal Recursion Semantics (MRS) provide the common scientific framework for DELPH-IN members, and many of the LinGO resources are part of the DELPH-IN open-source repository.

In past projects, the ERG was used in the Verbmobil machine translation system, and in an NSF-funded project on computer-aided speech generation for people who cannot speak because of disability.