LKB System Available Soon

We expect to make the first version of the new LKB typed feature structure system generally available very soon. The system is based on one developed by Ann Copestake some years ago, but has been recently very thoroughly revised and improved, mainly by John Carroll and Rob Malouf. The parser now operates at a rate which is acceptable for development of large-scale grammars, such as the LinGO ERG, without a time-consuming compilation step. The new LKB also incorporates an experimental generator which takes MRS semantics as input. Order independent default unification based on Lascarides and Copestake (in press) is integrated. We will make Lisp source and compiled versions of the LKB freely available via the Web, along with various sample grammars (including one which is based on the forthcoming Sag-Wasow textbook).

ALE 3.1 Released

ALE 3.1 is now available from the ALE Homepage: http://www.sfs.nphil.uni-tuebingen.de/~gpenn/ale.html

In this version:

• ALE is now substantially faster. The code has been extensively revised, making better use of shallow cuts, first-argument indexing, and other tricks of the Prolog trade,
• A new, faster, term-expansion-based compiler. ALE now uses only one zero-byte intermediate file to compile its intermediate code. Intermediate code is saved for future use by saving the Prolog database itself,
• ALE Source-level Debugger 2.0, which now supports semantic-head-driven generation,
• Lexicon compile/consult options (lex_compile/0, lex_consult/0). Consulting the lexicon substantially reduces compilation time, with negligible consequences at run-time for most grammars,
• New commands to modify the lexicon incrementally (update_lex/1, retract_lex/1). Also export_words/2, to write the words of a lexicon to a stream,
• New parsing commands to filter solutions through a description and for batch parsing (rec/2,5, rec_best/2, rec_list/2,3),
• Several bug corrections,
• An updated user's manual,
• An updated SWI Prolog port.

As always, your comments and suggestions are welcome.

Prague Dependency Treebank 0.5 Released

The Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics (UFAL) at the Charles University, Prague, proudly announces that the first version of the PRAGUE DEPENDENCY TREEBANK has been made available to the research community.

The Prague Dependency Treebank (PDT) is a morphologically and syntactically annotated corpus of Czech as a representative of inflectionally rich free-word-order languages. (E.g., all the Slavic languages such as Russian, Polish, Serbo-Croatian and many others spoken together by more than 350 million people have similar typological properties as Czech in both morphology and syntax.) The current version of PDT (0.5) contains 456705 tokens (words+punctuation) in 26610 sentences and 576 files. For keeping results of NLP applications comparable the data has been divided into a training set (19126 sentences), a development test set (3697 sentences) and a (cross-)evaluation test data set (3787 sentences).

The documentation of PDT is linked from its main page at UFAL. Go to the UFAL home page, http://ufal.ms.mff.cuni.cz/, then click on "Projects" and "Treebank". The PDT Version 0.5 is freely available for research purposes provided you fill in and submit a licence agreement. The appropriate form is also linked from the PDT web page.

Thristle 1.6 Released

The Language Technology Group is pleased to announce the release of version 1.6 of the diagram display engine and editor Thistle. Here are some of the more conspicuous changes:

• a variety of new shapes (ellipse, roundrect, trapezoid)
• the size of text may be varied
• better generation of PostScript and Thistle script files
• UNIX programs for automatic creation of PostScript and Thistle script files
• a facility for automatically generating PostScript and Thistle script files from remote Web pages.

Registered users of Thistle can collect a copy following the standard instructions. Follow the above link to register.

Readers of this newsletter are most likely to be interested in the HPSG diagram class, available via http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/software/thistle/demos/index.html and in the fact that, browser permitting, PostScript representations of diagrams can now be constructed from a Web page without having a local installation of Thistle.