7 December: fyi -- free grammar development software

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Hello,

I just wanted to point you to a new realizer (+sentence planner,
+fission) with an underlying grammar formalism called "Multimodal
Functional Unification Grammar" (MUG).

http://web.media.mit.edu/~dreitter/mug/

It comes with a graphical development environment to help debug the
grammars.

MUG's unification mechanism is loosely based on FUF. MUG mainly differs
from FUF in two aspects: a) it generates output in different modalities
(as in screen display or TTS voice output) in parallel. b) It uses soft
constraints to rank potential outputs, adapting to situation and device
models.

It's implemented in Prolog, and a socket-based interface is available
for use in dialogue systems. The socket-based version is optimized for
efficiency. It'll run on most Unixes (Linux, Mac OSX) and Windows. We
supply a (probably not perfectly polished) tutorial, and there are some
short papers from HLT/NAACL04 and INLG04. (More is available on
request.)

The system is available for free as open source under the GNU Public
License, courtesy of MIT Media Lab Europe and the European Commission
(FASiL grant).

-- David

--
David Reitter - ICCS/HCRC, Informatics, University of Edinburgh -
http://www.reitter-it-media.de

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