The SAUMER system uses specifications of natural language grammars, which consist of rules and metarules. to provide a semantic interpretation of an input sentence. The SAUMER ' Specification Language (SSL) is a programming language which c o m b i n ~ some of the features of generalised phrase structure grammars (Gazdar. 1981 ). like the correspondence between syntactic and semantic rules, with definite clause grammars (DCC-s) (Pereira and Warren. 1980) to create an executable g r a m m a r specification. .
