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From: li@hjelmslev.ling.gu.se (Linguistic Instruments)
Subject: RE: Announcing Grammar Laboratories for the Macintosh
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Sorry for messing up the demo distribution of the grammar laboratories
the way we did. A lot of people complained that they were not able to
de-hex the files that they downloaded from hjelmslev.ling.gu.se .

For those who did not succeed, we now would like to recommend
downloading the laboratories from hjelmslev.ling.gu.se again (rather
than from info-mac, since the hjelmslev.ling.gu.se archive has been
updated slightly).

The earlier distribution did also have a problem on the AV Macs, that
was pointed out to us. The distribution that is now downloadable from
hjelmslev.ling.gu.se has corrected that problem, so that the programs
do now run as they should, *except* that, on an AV Mac, the Generator's
speech option cannot be checked, or else the machine will bomb. We will
of course try to fix the speech disorder on the AV Mac as soon as possible.

Once again sorry for the inconvenience we might have caused you.

Best regards,

Bjoern Beskow
Torbjoern Lager
Linguistic Instruments


   /
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                 *****   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 site:

        hjelmslev.ling.gu.se/pub/li/psg-laboratory-11.hqx
                                    dcg-laboratory-11.hqx
                                    patr-laboratory-11.hqx
                                    cg-laboratory-11.hqx

The Grammar Laboratories are *shareware programs*. This means that if
you use them, you should pay for them. For further information, please
contact:

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

  E-mail: li@ling.gu.se
  Fax:    +46-31-773 48 53

