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We investigate the utility of supertag information for guiding an existing dependency parser of German. Using weighted constraints to integrate the additionally available information, the decision process of the parser is influenced by changing its preferences, without excluding alternative structural interpretations from being considered. The paper reports on a series of experiments using varying models of supertags that significantly increase the parsing accuracy. In addition, an upper bound on the accuracy that can be achieved with perfect supertags is estimated.

The PARC 700 dependency bank is a potentially very useful resource for parser evaluation that has, so to speak, a high barrier to entry, because of tokenisation that is quite different from the source of the data, the Penn Treebank, and because there is no representation of word order, producing an uncertainty factor of some 15%. There is also a small, but perhaps not insignificant, number of errors. When using the dependency bank for evaluation, it seems likely that these things will cause inflated counts for mismatches, so to obtain more accurate measurements, it is desirable to eliminate them. The work reported here consists of an automatic conversion of the dependency bank into a Prolog representation where the word order is explicit, as well as graphical representations of the dependency trees for all 700 sentences, automatically generated from the Prolog data. As a side effect of the transformation, errors were detected and corrected. It is hoped that this work will lead to more widespread use of the PARC 700 dependency bank for parser evaluation. * There are many variations on this structure in the Penn Treebank.† Bies (1995, pp. 46-7).

Current computer conflict simulation games, or wargames, are opaque in the sense that most of the game mechanisms are not directly visible to the players and are frequently not described in user accessible documentation, have a transient lifetime that is mainly shaped by the evolution of graphics hardware and processor speed, and do not, in contrast with, for example, the well-known abstract board games CHESS and GO, have the technical prerequisites for critical intellectual discussion that the thoughtintensive and knowledge-rewarding character of these games seems to warrant. The main reason for this state of affairs is that many of the mechanisms of the games, and in particular the details of how the game state changes over time, are directly expressed in computer code. This is purely a technical problem, and it has a straightforward solution, namely, treating this information as data by creating a formalism for describing not just the game map and playing pieces but also all the game rules including the "sequence of play." The article suggests such a formalism and shows a complete specification of a simple, but complicated enough for present purposes, "introductory" board wargame. This formalism, with tools that support it, can provide an unambiguous authoritative definition of the rules, accessible by both human and computer players; would allow existing board wargames to be played on a computer, without any simplifications or sacrifices of rule details; and may allow construction of more advanced computer players, since a complete formal specification of the game rules is available as input to them.The term wargaming covers a wide spectrum of activities, from multiday events involving purpose-built facilities and hundreds of people to inexpensive game software for personal computers. While wargaming in some form has a long history, 1 the traditions that exist today can be traced back to 19th-century Prussia. 2 Parallel to the military use of wargames for training 3 and research, 4 a tradition exists of recreational or hobby wargaming, which started in the early 20th century and grew into a significant industry in the second half of it (this type of wargaming is marginal compared with "real-time strategy" and "first-person shooter" games. As objects of analysis, however, games in the "classical" format, characterized by step-wise movement on a hexagonal grid, 5 have some advantages. Because of the discrete, low granularity modeling of time and space, things such as the number of possible unit locations, the number of possible moves at any one time, and the total number of moves in a game are tractable. This means that game states and histories can be described in print using a reasonable amount of space. Detailed, concrete discussions of the play of specific games is quite common in the literature on hobby wargaming, 6 as it is in the literature on the board games CHESS and GO. 7 Wargames differ from the latter, of course, in that each game has its own rules, and these rule sets can differ considerably. With ...