Conclusion

While the techniques outlined here have been applied in ways particular to a systemic grammar, and for a particular implementation, there are principles behind the re-representations which are general to all implementations:

1. Avoid DNF-expansion where possible, as in Kasper's unification algorithm.
2. Delay expansion to a later time -- information gained later may show the description to be inconsistent in the definite component.
3. When expansion is necessary,
   1. Try to extract out sub-descriptions which can be used, rather than expanding the entire grammar.
   2. Expand out first disjunctions which are most likely to conflict, since this will reduce the total number of terms which will need to be multiplied.
   3. Avoid expanding terms that can be known to be incompatible.

1. We start with the Nigel grammar, as used in the Penman Generation System, slightly modified for parsing purposes.
2. This grammar is then reduced by applying register-restrictions, leaving a less complex grammar, but a grammar which still handles the bulk of the phenomena in the target texts.
3. Sub-descriptions of the grammar tailored for particular processes are then extracted, and expanded out as a precompile step, producing a set of `chunks' which can be used in parsing. This expansion takes approximately 2 minutes using Sun Common Lisp on a Sun Sparc II.
4. The `chunked' grammar is then used to parse sentences. On the above-mentioned platform, parsing a sentence like ``A user-password is a character string consisting of a maximum of eight alpha-numeric characters.'' took 35 seconds to parse. This parser is slow, compared to most non-systemic parsers, but is far faster than the parser would be without the methods outlined here.

• Streamlining the unification process.
• Moving more processing to the pre-compilation stage.
• Reducing the complexity of the description without reducing its coverage.
• Incorporating heuristics to resolve ambiguities without full expansion.