Grammar Labs

Appeared in Volume 8/2, May 1995

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 designed as aids to explore formal grammars for natural language. They help the understanding of 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.

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.

Fully functional versions of the Grammar Laboratories, freely distributed for evaluation, can be retrieved by anonymous FTP from:
ftp://hjelmslev.ling.gu.se/pub/li

. The code is in: psg-laboratory-11.hqx, dcg-laboratory-11.hqx, patr-laboratory-11.hqx, and cg-laboratory-11.hqx.

For further information, please contact:

Linguistic Instruments
Dept. of Linguistics
Goeteborg Univ.
S-412 98 Goeteborg, Sweden
Email: li@ling.gu.se