Software engineering aspects

Abstract

The formal specifications of the Rosetta modules do not fully determine the algorithms that implement them. This leaves ample room for consideration about performance optimisation or subjective criteria such as elegance to influence the actual algorithms. Decisions must be made about the algorithms in each of the Rosetta modules. These algorithms, some of which were discussed in the previous chapter, are not the only subject of design decisions that have to be made, nor are they the most important ones. Many questions must be posed and answered while building a system like Rosetta. What does the user interface look like? What debugging facilities must be offered for developing linguistic software? What are the most convenient interfaces between the Rosetta modules, and what do S-trees, syntactic derivation trees (D-trees), semantic derivation trees and dictionaries look like? Can a translation system be run as one process, or is it better to split it into several subsystems? Each module of the Rosetta system produces a set of results. How does one represent such sets if they are very large? In what order do we process their elements? What programming language is chosen? Is linguistic data written in this language or in a special-purpose language that is subsequently translated into the programming language? Many of these problems can be dealt with in various ways. Their solutions are a matter of taste rather than of principle and do not deserve a detailed discussion here. The design of user interfaces is the subject of another discipline and is also beyond the scope of this book. Below we touch upon issues of software engineering that either involve a problematic aspect of the formalism or have proved to be essential in building our translation system.