The analysis of natural language in the context of keyboard-driven dialogue systems is the central issue addressed in this paper. A module that corrects typing errors, performs domain-specific morphological analysis is developed. A parser for typed unification grammars is designed and implemented in C++; for description of the lexicon and the grammer a specialised specification language is developed. It is argued that typed unification grammars and especially the newly developed specification language are convenient formalisms for describing natural language use in dialogue systems. Research on these issues is carried out in the context of the SCHISMA project, a research project in linguistic engineering; participants in SCHISMA are KPN Research and the University of Twente.

Head-Corner (HC) parsing has come up in computational linguistics a few years ago, motivated by linguistic arguments. This idea is a heuristic, rather than a fail-safe principle, hence it is relevant indeed to consider the worst-case behaviour of the HC parser. We define a novel predictive head-corner chart parser of cubic time complexity. We start with a left-corner (LC) chart parser, which is easier to understand. Subsequently, the LC chart parser is generalized to an HC chart parser. It is briefly sketched how the parser can be enhanced with feature structures.