4 - Some Reflections on the Conversion of the TIC Lexicon into DATR

Summary

Abstract

The Traffic Information Collator (TIC) (Allport, 1988a,b) is a prototype system which takes verbatim police reports of traffic incidents, interprets them, builds a picture of what is happening on the roads and broadcasts appropriate messages automatically to motorists where necessary. Cahill and Evans (1990) described the process of converting the main TIC lexicon (a lexicon of around 1000 words specific to the domain of traffic reports) into DATR (Evans and Gazdar, 1989a,b; 1990). This chapter reviews the strategy adopted in the conversion discussed in that paper, and discusses the results of converting the whole lexicon, together with statistics comparing efficiency and performance between the original lexicon and the DATR version.

Introduction

The Traffic Information Collator (TIC) is a prototype system which takes verbatim police reports of traffic incidents, interprets them, builds a picture of what is happening on the roads and broadcasts appropriate messages automatically to motorists where necessary. In Cahill and Evans (1990), the basic strategy of defining the structure of lexical entries was described. That paper concentrated on the main TIC lexicon, which was just one part of a collection of different kinds of lexical information and only dealt with a small fragment even of that. The whole conversion involved collating all of that information into a single DATR description.