LINGUIST List 8.126

Tue Jan 28 1997

FYI: Abstracts, Resource Grammar, Fun

Editor for this issue: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar <aristarlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Michael Bernstein, FYI: Linguistics Working Papers Abstracts on-line
2. Dan Flickinger, English Resource Grammar Online Consortium
3. Kim Mellen, Fun Web Page Announcement

Cascadilla Press is pleased to announce a web version of Linguistics
Working Papers Abstracts, with free access to institutional subscribers.
The web site includes all the information published in LWPA, including
hundreds of abstracts and information about over 20 working papers series.
The site is fully searchable.

Further information is at <http://www.cascadilla.com/lwpa.html>;. That
page contains details about the series, as well as links to both the
full web version of LWPA and an example area.

If you'd like your department or library to subscribe to LWPA, there's
a recommendation form at <http://www.cascadilla.com/lwpa-rec.html>; which
you can print out. An institutional subscription does include free access
to the LWPA web site for everyone at the institution.

Yours,
 Michael Bernstein
 Cascadilla Press
 michaelcascadilla.com

English Resource Grammar Online Consortium

The existing ERGO Consortium for HPSG grammar development, coordinated by
Stanford University, is not related to the recently announced Ergo Linguistic
Technologies based in Hawaii. Derek Bickerton and Phil Bralich recently
announced the availability of a web site for an English parser using the
address "www.ergo-ling.com". Their choice of name for their company (Ergo
Linguistic Technologies) unfortunately creates the potential for confusion in
the CL research community, because of the prior existence of the ERGO (English
Resource Grammar Online) Consortium, a collection of U.S. and Canadian research
groups engaged in the cooperative implementation of a broad-coverage HPSG
grammar of English. This consortium bears no relation to Bralich's company,
and the grammar we are developing is currently intended for research and
teaching, not for commercial applications.

The ERGO Consortium was established in January 1996 at the Center for the Study
of Language and Information (CSLI) at Stanford University. Its goal is to
develop an increasingly robust, multi-purpose, computational implementation of
English based on the analytic framework of Head-Driven Phrase Structure
Grammar. Consortium members both contribute to and benefit from the shared
resources of the consortium, including lexicon and grammar fragments suitable
for teaching or as the basis for grant-sponsored research projects.

Initial contributing members of the ERGO Consortium are: Stanford University
(CSLI), Brandeis University, Carnegie-Mellon University, Ohio State University,
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Beckman Institute), Simon Fraser
University, and the German AI Research Center (DFKI) in Saarbruecken. An
initial project with IBM has allowed the consortium to develop on-line lexicons
suitable for diverse purposes. Members added in the past year include the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of California at
Berkeley, SUNY Buffalo, the University of Sydney, and the Oregon Graduate
Institute. The consortium also includes participating or interested individual
researchers at SRI, AT&T, IBM, and Boeing.

The software platform for grammar development used in the consortium is the
PAGE system developed and supported by the German Artificial Intelligence
Institute (DFKI) in Saarbruecken, Germany. The grammar itself is maintained at
CSLI within the English Resource Grammar project, established in 1994 and
directed by Ivan Sag as part of the long-term HPSG project at CSLI. An initial
release of the grammar to the consortium was made in April 1996, and has been
used by members for both instruction and research, with succeeding releases
planned semi-annually to incorporate extensions in coverage.

Interested researchers working on English in HPSG are invited to contact CSLI
for more information on the ERGO consortium, at the following address:

 Dan Flickinger
 ERGO Project Manager
 CSLI, Stanford University
 email: dancsli.stanford.edu
 

Announcing a lighthearted web page for linguists:

Operation Branch Out! Brought to you by the Coalition for the
Eradication of John, Mary, Bill and Sue from Linguistic Example
Sentences (CEJMBSLES, for short) is now ONLINE at:

http://ccwf.cc.utexas.edu/~kmel/branch.html

Come by, read our mission statement, and join us in this revolutionary
cause.

Kim Mellen
Department of Linguistics, University of Texas at Austin
kmelmail.utexas.edu
http://ccwf.cc.utexas.edu/~kmel