The design of a computer language for linguistic information

A considerable body of accumulated knowledge about the design of languages for communicating information to computers has been derived from the subfields of programming language design and semantics. It has been the goal of the P A r R group at SRI to utilize a relevant portion of this knowledge in implementing tools to facilitate communication of linguistic information to computers. The PATR-II formalism is our current computer language for encoding linguistic information. This paper, a brief overview of that formalism, attempts to explicate our design decisions in terms of a set of properties that effective computer languages should incorporate.