Richter: Logic Programming for Grammar Implementations (WS 07/08)

General Information on the Course

• Course Description in the Kommentierte Vorlesungsverzeichnis (German)
• Information Sheet (distributed in class)
• Classes: Our class meets Wednesdays, 14ct-15.45 (Seminarraum, 1.13), and Thursdays, 9ct-10.45 (Brechtbau, 0.35 -- changed from Friday at the same hour in Seminarraum 1.13). The course language is English.
• Office Hours: Tuesdays, 10.00-11.00, SfS, Room 2.17 (Email: f.richter@em.uni-frankfurt.de)
  
• Official statement to be included (and signed) in every Schriftliche Hausarbeit or written summary

Preliminary List of Course Readings

• Michael A. Covington (1994): Natural Language Processing for Prolog Programmers. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 07458
• Michael A. Covington, Donald Nute, André Vellino (1997): Prolog Programming in Depth. Prentice Hall. Upper Saddle River, NJ 07632
• Gerald Penn et al. (2003): ALE. The Attribute Logic Engine. User's Guide with TRALE Extensions.
• Leon Sterling, Ehud Shapiro (1994): The Art of Prolog. The MIT Press

Software and Manuals

• SWI-Prolog
• SICStus Prolog
• Using TRALE in the computer pool (installation based on SICStus 3.12.8 and Java 1.6):
  • Add the following two directories to your PATH variable:
    /afs/sfs/lehre/fr/newtrale/bin
    /afs/sfs/lehre/fr/gralej/bin
  • Start a TRALE session in shells in which these paths are set by typing:
    1. gralej &
    2. newtrale -f localhost 1080 &
    The first step starts the graphical interface, the second starts TRALE and connects TRALE to the interface.
  • Using the Source Level Debugger in this version of TRALE:
    1. Type at the PROLOG prompt: 'ale_flag(debugger,_,on).'
    2. Compile the grammar using 'dcompile_gram(< name_of_grammar_file >).'
    3. The parse predicate is drec/1.
• Using an older version of TRALE (for the Zebra Puzzle) in the computer pool:
  • In addition to the foregoing, also add the following directory to your PATH variable:
    /afs/sfs/home/milca/a4/bin
  • Start a TRALE session in shells in which this path is set by typing:
    1. gralej &
    2. trale -f localhost 1080 &
    Do not use this version of TRALE with grammars, it will not behave as expected.
  • Use of Source Level Debugger (for dquery/1): 'dcompile_gram(< name_of_grammar_file >)'

Hand-outs, Slides, TRALE files

• Syllabus
• Michael Covington's toy grammar of English in TRALE: signature file (signature), theory file (theory.pl)
• A grammar of aⁿbⁿcⁿ in TRALE: signature file (signature), theory file (theory.pl)
• The Zebra Puzzle (User's Guide, page 34):
  Three different houses each contain a different pet, a different drink, and an inhabitant of a different nationality. The following six facts are true about these houses:
  1. The man in the third house drinks milk.
  2. The Spaniard owns the dog.
  3. The Ukranian drinks the tea.
  4. The Norwegian lives in the first house.
  5. The Norwegian lives next to the tea-drinker.
  6. The juice-drinker owns the fox.
  Who owns the zebra? Who drinks juice?
  In TRALE: signature file (signature), theory file (theory.pl)
• Separate webpage with links to the grammars of of A Web-based Course in Grammar Formalisms and Parsing, adapted to the new TRALE system
• Oral Presentations - A Practical Guide

Student Presentations

• Desislava Zhekova: Definite Clause Grammars. Here is a zip-archive with the grammars which were shown and discussed during the presentation.
• Aleksandar L. Dimitrov: Earley Parsing in Prolog. Here are the core of the Earley parser used in the presentation (from Michael Covington's (1994) book), and a separate file with lexicon and phrase structure rules.
• Johannes Dellert: TRALE Feature Logic
• Kilian Evang: ALE Lexical Rules. Here is a tarred directory containing the toy examples discussed in the presentation. It unpacks to a directory 'trale/' with a number of subdirectories.

Homework Assignments

• Thursday, November 22nd:
  1. Extend the predicate flatten/2 in such a way that it removes duplicates and returns a sorted list of integers (or letters) in increasing (or alphabetical) order.
  2. Make yourself familiar with the predicates substitute/4 and ground_n/1 by tracing appropriate examples. The predicates are defined in the files termstructure-predicates.pl and ground.pl.
  3. Generalize the predicate substitute/4 to a treatment of non-ground terms.

A few relevant websites

• at the SfS:
  • Seminar für Sprachwissenschaft
  • HPSG literature by Tübingen authors
  • The MiLCA project Grammar Formalisms and Parsing
  • Fachschaft Sprachwissenschaft

• at the Universität Tübingen:
  • The Library Catalogue
  • Sonderforschungsbereich 441 Linguistische Datenstrukturen

• elsewhere in the world:
  • The History of Mathematics Archive
  • The linguist list