A grammar formalism with augmented phrase-construction rules

The paper describes the syntactic component of a grammar of a new form that has been developed for parsing and interpreting natural language inputs to the TENDUM dialogue system . The 'phrase-construction rules' of this grammar generate syntactic representations in the form of tree structures which may contain crossing branches, indicating the presence of a discontinuous constituent that functions as a syntactic unit. This has the advantage that a close correspondence between syntactic and semantic units can be achieved, which is important in designing a parsing process where syntactic and semantic analysis go hand in hand.