LINGUIST List 6.464

Tue 28 Mar 1995

FYI: FRACAS project, Grammar Laboratories, Chomsky, LaTex

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. , Correction to announcement about WWW site
2. Bjoern Beskow, FYI: Grammar laboratories for Macintosh
3. doughert, Chomsky's grammar in Prolog
4. , Re: 6.408 Sum: Latex on PC's

I noticed that in the announcement of the WWW site of the FRACAS project that
came out in the list (LINGUIST List: Vol-6-390. Sun 19 Mar 1995), the `tilde'
character "~" was changed into a `percent' character `%', so that the
URL, that should have read:

 http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/~fracas/
 ^THIS SHOULD BE A TILDE

came out as :

 http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/%fracas/

I will add that the same thing happened when the announcement was posted on the
`LN' list, and I was told then that the problem was due to the fact that the
listserver software for `LN' runs on IBM software, so that ASCII characters
must be converted into the character format used by IBM computers (EBCDIC, I
think), and some piece of software somewhere does this conversion
incorrectly. This means of course that this announcement, as well, may come out
incorrectly when posted on the list - the two instances of `tilde' will be
replaced by two percent signs - hence my use of explicit names so that the
readers of the list may understand what I mean.

Thanks,

 Massimo Poesio

 University of Edinburgh | Email: poesiocogsci.ed.ac.uk
 Centre for Cognitive Science | Phone: +44-31-650-6988
 2 Buccleuch Place | Fax: +44-31-650-4587
 Edinburgh, EH8 9LW, Scotland, UK | http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/~poesio/

Since we have received a lot of questions about the Grammar
Laboratories lately, we hope we are excused for sending this
information once more.

Cheers,

Bjoern Beskow
Linguistic Instruments

 ***** Grammar Laboratories *****
 for the Macintosh

 by

 ***** LINGUISTIC INSTRUMENTS *****

 A Campus Company at the
 Department of Linguistics
 Goteborg University

Linguistic Instruments is a small company specializing in research
instruments and teaching programs for linguists. In our series of
*Grammar Laboratories* for the Macintosh we currently offer four
packages:

 - Phrase Structure Grammar Laboratory
 - Definite Clause Grammar Laboratory
 - PATR Laboratory
 - Categorial Grammar Laboratory

The Grammar Laboratories are systems for writing grammars in a form
that may be manipulated by a computer. They are designed as aids for
students to explore formal grammars for natural language. They help
the student understand the relationship between strings, rules, and
trees, to grasp the concepts of parsing and generation, the notions of
syntactic ambiguity and recursion, as well as other important concepts
of general and computational linguistics.

For the researcher, although the grammar laboratories should not be
regarded as full-fledged grammar development environments, they are
nevertheless useful for testing out ideas, in a quick and simple
way. Moreover, the programs are able to display analysis trees and
feature structures graphically, the graphics can be formatted in all
sorts of ways, and subsequently exported to other applications.

Each program has two tools, a parser and a generator. The Parser tool
parses sentences and graphically displays the corresponding categories
and trees (if any). The Generator tool accepts as input a start symbol
and a specification of a maximal tree depth, and (randomly or
systematically) generates any combination of a string, spoken
utterance, category symbol, or tree.

The Grammar Laboratories form an integrated package with a generic
design. Nevertheless, each laboratory has some distinguishing
features:

 - PSG Laboratory: A useful tool for introductory courses. It
 directly supports the standard notation for
 (context-free) phrase structure grammar,
 including conventions for optional and
 alternative constituents.

 - DCG Laboratory: An environment for Definite Clause Grammar
 supporting variable categories, left-recursive
 rules, and a limited use of escape to Prolog.

 - PATR Laboratory: Over and above the standard PATR formalism, this
 system supports list-valued features and feature
 structure variables. The graphical display of
 feature structures is enhanced with colour coding
 for reentrancy.

 - CG Laboratory: Grammatical analyses can be displayed either in
 ordinary phrase structure trees or in the special
 kind of annotated proof trees characteristic of
 categorial grammar.

The Grammar Laboratories are *real* Macintosh applications, with all
the functionality and user-friendliness that you have learned to
expect from Macintosh programs. Each package comes with printed
documentation in the form of a 20 pages booklet, as well as a
collection of sample grammars.

Fully functional versions of the Grammar Laboratories, freely
distributed for evaluation, can be retrieved by anonymous ftp from
the following sites:

 hjelmslev.ling.gu.se/pub/li/psg-laboratory-111.hqx
 dcg-laboratory-111.hqx
 patr-laboratory-111.hqx
 cg-laboratory-111.hqx

 sumex-aim.stanford.edu/info-mac/sci/psg-laboratory-111.hqx
 dcg-laboratory-111.hqx
 patr-laboratory-111.hqx
 cg-laboratory-111.hqx
 or at any mirror of info-mac.

For further information, please contact:

 Linguistic Instruments
 Dept of Linguistics
 Goeteborg University
 S-412 98 Goeteborg
 Sweden

 E-mail: liling.gu.se
 Fax: +46-31-773 48 53

Linguistic Instruments
Bjoern Beskow Goeteborg University
beskowling.gu.se Dept. of Linguistics
Tel: +46-31-773 11 77 S-412 98 Goeteborg
Fax: +46-31-773 48 53 Sweden

 At New York University, we are developing programs to encode
Noam Chomsky's generative grammar (the Minimalist Theory) into Prolog.
Almost all programs run on the freeware Prolog-2 (IBM) and
Open-Prolog (Macintosh). Every program runs on Quintus and C-Prolog.
 The goal is to place a graphically intensive hypertext
document on line for use by students and researchers.
 We have placed about 1/4 of our material on our (new)
WWW site:

 http://www.nyu.edu/pages/linguistics

 We would appreciate any comments (about theory, technical
problems, content, .jpg files, etc.) before we place the remaining
figures and hypertext on the node.
 If you could distribute this information, we would be
very appreciative.
Thank you,
Ray Dougherty
Linguistics Department
New York University
Natural Language Computing Project

Message 4: Re: 6.408 Sum: Latex on PC's

I have a minor correction to the summary: The Ymir server

) ymir.claremont.edu [134.173.4.23] [anonymous.tex.ibm_pc.emtex]

does not exist anymore. If you try to contact it, it denies anonymous
access.

 --J"org Knappen.