|
Program for Language Analysis and Inference |
University
of Heidelberg, Department of Computational Linguistics, Copyright Peter Hellwig
& Heinz-Detlev Koch
Versatile Tool for Grammar Writing
Useful for Teaching, Research and Development, and real NLP Applications
PLAIN is a Natural Language Processing system. At the same time
it is an Integrated Development Environment for (computational) linguists. It offers many tools for testing and
debugging while the linguist is drawing up a Dependency Unification Grammar (DUG). The formalism of DUG is Dependency
Representation Language (DRL). Since PLAIN is an interpreter of DRL, DRL is so to speak a high level programming language for linguists
PLAIN qualifies especially for start-up
projects that try to extent language processing to languages lacking resources so far.
DRL is simple and perspicuous. A DRL
expression consists of a dependency tree structure and sets of attribute and
values. It should be possible to create appropriate attributes for most predicates that empirical
linguists use when describing languages informally. Therefore it is easy to "translate" printed
dictionaries and school grammars into DRL. Nevertheless the implementation is
very efficient.
PLAIN offers the following
functionality:
Morphology
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Morphological paradigms derived from
cardinal forms (i.e. item and process morphology).
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Paradigms executed as FTN (i.e. item and arrangement morphology).
Parsing
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Lexicalistic approach to syntax, "every word behaves differently".
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A template is drawn up for each particular
syntagmatic relation.
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Syntactic frames are associated with
lexemes in terms of templates.
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Slot
and filler chart parsing.
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"Customized"
unification; attributes together with templates function as "word experts".
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Covering complements and adjuncts,
nucleus and raising, compounds, discontinuous constituents, coordination,
ellipsis and much more.
Tagger based on full or partial parsing
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Unlimited
range of tags (attributes and values) among which syntagmatic
roles and semantic features.
Transducer
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Paraphrasing, translation,
inferring.
Surface Generator
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Creating natural language phrases from DRL representations.
Download PLAIN is available for free (for non-commercial use) |
Documentation The
Linguist's Guide to PLAIN: 1 Morphology The
Linguist's Guide to PLAIN: 2 Syntax Background:
Dependency Unification Grammar Contact:
Try it out and give us feed back! Download
Get a copy of PLAIN Version 2.0 with demonstration lingware here! |