The claim is that the use of reversible grammars will eventually lead to better grammars. For example, a grammar that is written for parsing will typically over-generate quite a lot; i.e. it will assign logical forms to sentences that are in fact ungrammatical. Not only is such a state of affairs undesirable if we are interested in describing the relation between form and meaning, it can also be argued that over-generation of parsing is a problem, even if we are only interested in parsing well-formed utterances, because over-generation typically leads to `false ambiguities'.
An example may clarify this point (this example was actually encountered in the development of a working system). Consider a grammar for English that is intended to handle auxiliaries. Suppose that the English auxiliaries are analyzed as verbs that take an obligatory VP-complement. Moreover each auxiliary may restrict the vform (participle, infinite) of this complement. This allows the analysis of sentences such as
However, the possible order of English auxiliaries (eg. `have'
should precede `be') is not accounted for and the analysis sketched
above will for example allow sentences such as
In the case of a reversible grammar such constructions should clearly
not be generated, hence the analysis will be changed accordingly.
However, even if the grammar is only used for parsing, this analysis
runs into problems because it will assign two meanings to the
sentence:
The meanings that are assigned, roughly correspond to the sentences:
where only the first reading is acceptable. Thus, over-generation is not acceptable, even for grammars which are used only for parsing, because over-generation typically implies that `false ambiguities' are produced.
In some cases, the over-generation may also lead to an explosion of local possibilities during parsing. If the grammar is more constrained, then this may sometimes be good from an efficiency point of view, because in that case there are less local ambiguities the parser has to keep track of.1.1
Thus, a reversible architecture may be a useful methodology to obtain
a good parsing system.
Similarly, a grammar that is built for generation will usually under-generate; i.e. it will only generate a canonical sentence for a given logical form, even if there are several possibilities. Again, from a theoretical perspective this is clearly undesirable. It can be argued that a reversible architecture also leads to a better generation system. It has often been argued that, in particular situations, a generation system should produce an un-ambiguous utterance. In other situations, however, ambiguous utterances are harmless because the hearer can easily disambiguate the utterance. In [62] we propose a model of language production in which a generator instructs its grammatical component whether or not it should check for ambiguity of its proposed utterance. The grammatical component, quite independently, computes an un-ambiguous utterance if so desired. For this model to be possible at all, it must be the case that the grammatical component has at its disposal several utterances for a given semantic structure in order to find in a given situation the most appropriate one. Note that `ambiguity' might be only one of several parameters that may or may not be instantiated in a given situation. Summarizing this point, the claim is that under-generation is undesirable from the point of view of extendability.
Furthermore, a reversible grammar provides grammar writers with a very effective debugging tool. To check whether the grammar does accept ungrammatical sentences it is possible to use the generator to see whether such ungrammatical sentences are being produced. Clearly, this technique cannot be used to ensure that a grammar does not produce ungrammatical sentences, however in practice such a tool turns out to be quite useful, as many errors in the grammar are detected this way.