At 11:18 27/11/00 +0000, you wrote:
>[From an earlier message of Mark H's:]
>
>>>> I would like to hear someone describe what the disadvantages of
>>>> changing to ProXML are.
>
>As I see it they are (i) the time taken,
I don't see why it should take longer to use a language optimised
for the job rather than a general purpose language.
(iii) the danger of hidden "traps" -- technical or
>other problems with the re-write that might come to light half-way down
>the road.
Surely with our own code, we have complete control over this.
(iv) rules written directly in ProXML, or any
>programming language, might look even more unattractive to a linguist
>than the current Procsy rules.
I don't agree at all. ProXML is specifically designed for looking
at hierarchical data. This is exactly the phonological structure
we propose to be important. Where ProXML is ugly is when the knowledge
doesn't match the theory.
>Functionality: ProXML is an elegant language for changing values of
>attributes on an XML file with a reasonable amount of computational
>power. But that's not what Procsy does, and the most obvious things
>it currently does that ProXML can't easily handle are:
>
> reading in other files (the .x file)
I haven't put this in because I didn't think that PROSY would need to
read in ESPS files.
> examining the next node in sequence of a particular type
> (used in current Procsy rules like "if SEG+1: NAS is Y then ...")
There are a number of mechanisms for this, all more flexible than the
existing Python code.
> building up a data structure for output
> writing out a structured file at the end of processing
Mark and I agreed that we would probably need: (i) dynamic allocation of
data tables and (ii) more control over the times at which procedures
are called. I expected that we would need to add this.
In summary, we could end up with a set of scripts for synthesis
which just used XML for linguistic representations and proXML for
knowledge representation. Or we could have a motley collection of
C programs, Python programs, intermediate text files and rules designed
to work on linear phonological representations.
Mark
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Nov 28 2000 - 14:28:34 GMT