Section: Software

System DyALog

Participants : Éric Villemonte de La Clergerie [ correspondant ] , Djamé Seddah.

DyALog on INRIA GForge: http://dyalog.gforge.inria.fr/

DyALog provides an environment to compile and execute grammars and logic programs. It is essentially based on the notion of tabulation, i.e. of sharing computations by tabulating traces of them. DyALog is mainly used to build parsers for Natural Language Processing (NLP). It may nevertheless be used as a replacement for traditional PROLOG systems in the context of highly ambiguous applications where sub-computations can be shared.

The current release 1.13.0 of DyALog is freely available by FTP under an open source license and runs on Linux platforms for x86 architectures and on Mac OS X (ppc and intel). Two ports for 64bit architectures on Mac OS Intel and Linux have been added this year, with a speed-up of 2 wrt to their 32bits counterparts.

The current release handles logic programs, DCGs (Definite Clause Grammars ), FTAGs (Feature Tree Adjoining Grammars ), FTIGs (Feature Tree Insertion Grammars ) and XRCGs (Range Concatenation Grammars with logic arguments). Several extensions have been added to most of these formalisms such as intersection, Kleene star, and interleave operators. Typed Feature Structures (TFS) as well as finite domains may be used for writing more compact and declarative grammars [118] .

C libraries can be used from within DyALog to import APIs (mysql , libxml , sqlite , ...).

DyALog is largely used within ALPAGE to build parsers but also derivative softwares, such as a compiler of Meta-Grammars (cf.  5.4 ). It has also been used for building a parser from a large coverage French TIG/TAG grammar derived from a Meta-Grammar. This parser has been used for the Parsing Evaluation campaign EASy and the two PASSAGE campaigns (Dec. 2007 and Nov. 2009), cf.  8.1.1 and [114] ,[54] .

DyALog is used at LORIA (Nancy), University of Coruña (Spain), Instut Gaspard Monge (Univ. Marne La Vallée), and University of Nice.

DyALog and other companion modules are available on INRIA GForge.