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Appointment scheduling is a problem faced daily by many individuals and organizations. Cooperating agent systems have been developed to partially automate this task. In order to extend the circle of participants as far as possible we advocate the use of natural language transmitted by email. We describe Cosma, a fully implemented German language server for existing appointment scheduling agent systems. Cosma can cope with multiple dialogues in parallel, and accounts for differences in dialogue behaviour between human and machine agents. NL coverage of the sublanguage is achieved through both corpusbased grammar development and the use of message extraction techniques.

In this pa per we describe an effort to construct a catalogue of syntacti c da ta, exemplifying the major syntactic patterns of German. The purpose of the corpus is to support t he diagnosis of errors in the syntact ic components of natural language processing (NLP) systems. Two secondary aims are the evaluation of NLP systems components and the support of theoretical and empirical work on German syntax. Th e data consist of artificially and systematically constructed expressions, including also negative (ungrammatical) examples. The data are organized into a relational data base and annotated with some basic information about the phenomena illustrated and the internal structure of the sample sentences . The organization of the data supports selected systematic testing of specifi c areas of syntax, but a lso serves the purpose of a linguistic data base. Th e paper first gives some general motivation for the necessity of syntactic precision in some areas of NLP and discusses the potential contri bution of a syntactic data base to the field of component evaluation . The second part of the paper describes the set up and control methods applied in the construct ion of t he sentence sui te and annota tions to the examples. We illustrate the approach with the examp le of verbal government. T he section also contains a descri ption of the abstract data model, the design of the data base and t he query language used to access the data. The final sections compare our work to existing approaches and sketch some future extensions.We invite other research groups to participate in our effort, so that the diagnostics tool can eventually become pub lic domain .

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