Newsgroups: comp.ai.nat-lang,comp.lang.prolog
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!howland.reston.ans.net!pipex!uknet!festival!edcogsci!jo
From: jo@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Jo Calder)
Subject: Announcement of a new release of the Pleuk grammar shell
Message-ID: <D2I00K.FqC@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
Organization: AI and HCRC, University of Edinburgh
Date: Mon, 16 Jan 1995 12:29:06 GMT
Lines: 124
Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu comp.ai.nat-lang:2673 comp.lang.prolog:12125

This message announces a release (version 1.1beta) of the Pleuk
grammar development shell.  (The designation "beta" arises because of
the preliminary nature of the implementation of some of the
formalisms, notable vNTag and DCG.)  Many different grammatical
formalisms can be embedded within Pleuk.  The following currently work
with Pleuk:   

Cfg	A simple context-free grammar system, intended for
	demonstration purposes. 

HPSG-PL	A system for developing HPSG-style grammars, produced at
	Simon Fraser University, Canada, by Fred Popowich, Sandi
	Kodric and Carl Vogel. 

Mike	A simple graph-based unification system, enhanced with
	additional operations for the treatment of free word order 
	proposed by Mike Reape in various publications.   

SLE	A graph-based formalism enhanced with arbitrary relations in
	the manner of Johnson and Rosner (EACL, 1989) and Doerre and
	Eisele.  Delayed evaluation is used to compute infinite
	relations.  This system has been used for the development of
	several HPSG-style grammars.

Term	A term-based unification grammar system, originally developed
	for the support of Unification Categorial Grammar (Zeevat,
	Klein and Calder).

Ale	The Attribute Logic Engine by Bob Carpenter and Gerald Penn of
	CMU (version 2.0.1)

vNTag	Gertjan van Noord's TAG system

DCG	Definite clause grammars

Sample grammars are provided for all of these formalisms.  

The main features in this release include: addition of the Ale
formalism; facilities for maintaining and testing corpora; greater
user control over the visual appearance of the system; addition of the
vNTag formalism; the use of graphical output by default; addition of
the DCG formalism.  Many other errors in programming have been
isolated and removed.

Work continues on other formalisms, including CUF from the University
of Stuttgart, static discontinuity grammars as in the work of Veronica
Dahl and others, Lambek-style deductive systems, ...

Pleuk features a unique ``derivation checker'', a graphical system
which allows the user to `grow derivations' by actions including the
selection of lexical or other material and the insertion of that
material into larger structures (as defined by the formalism in
use). This provides an alternative to the use of parsers and
generators for investigating the consequences of grammatical
descriptions.  Facilities are also provided to allow Pleuk to process
collections of test sentences.  

In designing Pleuk, we have attempted to make no assumptions as to the
syntax and semantics of grammar formalisms.  This means that Pleuk
gives relatively little support for the detailed operations of
particular grammars---the formalism has to supply parsers and
generators.  We do provide relatively sophisticated support for
manipulating grammars as a whole (in terms of the files that define
some grammar), interacting with analysers for those grammars and for
the display of grammatical definitions or the results of analysis.
The latter is achieved by means of a printer specifically designed for
representing information in conventional linguistic terms, e.g.
attribute-value diagrams, trees, sets, sequences and arrangements of
these.

We are making Pleuk available to the computational linguistics
community in the hope that it will provide a set of facilities for the
production of new grammar formalisms.  We also expect that certain of
its components will be easily reused in other systems, and encourage
people to do so.  

In many respects, the functionality of Pleuk is similar to the Hdrug
system produced by Gertjan van Noord, of the University of Groningen.
Information about that system can be obtained via the world-wide web:

http://tyr.let.rug.nl/~vannoord

Pleuk requires SICStus prolog version 2.1#9 or later, plus a variety
of ancillary programs available free of charge from many FTP servers.
Pleuk is available from the following FTP site:

ftp.cogsci.ed.ac.uk:/pub/pleuk

The file README contains instructions for downloading the system.  The
file Release_notes contains recent news about the system.  

Pleuk is known to work on the following systems:  Sun SPARCs SunOS
{4,5}.*, HP-UX. 

For more information, send email to pleuk@cogsci.ed.ac.uk.  

Jo Calder			J.Calder@ed.ac.uk
Chris Brew 			chrisbr@cogsci.ed.ac.uk

Language Technology Group
Human Communication Research Centre
University of Edinburgh
2 Buccleuch Place
Edinburgh
Scotland EH8 9LW


Kevin Humphreys			kwh@cogsci.ed.ac.uk
Centre for Cognitive Science
University of Edinburgh
2 Buccleuch Place
Edinburgh
Scotland EH8 9LW

Mike Reape			mreape@cs.tcd.ie
Computer Science
Trinity College 
Dublin

-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Jonathan Calder
Department of Artificial Intelligence    Human Communication Research Centre 
Room E6, 80 South Bridge                 2/G16 Buccleuch Place, 
