Section: Software

Syntax

Participants : Pierre Boullier [ correspondant ] , Benoît Sagot.

See also the web page http://syntax.gforge.inria.fr/ .

The (currently beta) version 6.0 of the Syntax system (freely available on INRIA GForge) includes various deterministic and non-deterministic CFG parser generators. It includes in particular an efficient implementation of the Earley algorithm, with many original optimizations, that is used in several of Alpage's NLP tools, including the pre-processing chain Sx Pipe and the LFG deep parser SxLfg . This implementation of the Earley algorithm has been recently extended to handle probabilistic CFG (PCFG), by taking into account probabilities both during parsing (beam) and after parsing (n -best computation). Syntax 6.0 also includes parsers for various contextual formalisms, including a parser for Range Concatenation Grammars (RCG) that can be used among others for TAG and MC-TAG parsing.

During year 2008, this version of Syntax has been successfuly ported to many 32-bit and 64-bit architectures, in collaboration with project-team VASY (INRIA Rhône-Alpes), one of Syntax ' user for non-NLP applications. Their expertise in software porting has helped Syntax developers to enhance the quality, portability, organization and distribution of the system.

This should lead in the near future to a full distribution of a non-beta version of Syntax 6.0.

Other current or former direct users of Syntax , outside Alpage, include Alexis Nasr (Marseilles) and other members of the Sequoia ANR project (see section  8.1.2 ), as well as (indirectly) all Sx Pipe and/or SxLfg users.