Gregor Erbach (erbach@coli.uni-sb.de)
Wed, 5 Oct 1994 19:03:12 +0100
Now available: the ProFIT system, an extension of Prolog with sorted feature structures (including multi-dimensional inheritance), finite domains, feature search, cyclic terms, and templates. The acronym ProFIT stands for Prolog with Features Inheritance, and Templates ProFIT works as a pre-processor, which takes a file containing a ProFIT program as input, and gives a file with a Prolog program as output. Sorted feature terms and finite domains are compiled into a Prolog term representation, and the usual Prolog term unification is used at runtime, so that there is no slowdown through a unification algorithm, and no meta-interpreter is needed. ProFIT uses the same techniques for compiling sorted feature terms and finite domains into Prolog terms as the Core Langauge Engine of SRI Cambridge and the Advanced Linguistic Engineering Platform (ALEP 2.2) by the European Community, BIM, and Cray Systems. ProFIT is not a grammar formalism (although it is motivated by NLP), although it provides some ingredients that are considered typical of grammar formalisms. The goal of ProFIT is to provide these datatypes without enforcing any particular theory of grammar, parsing or generation. ProFIT can be used to extend your favourite Prolog-based grammar formalism, parser and generator with the expressive power of sorted feature terms. In order to develop, test and use ProFIT programs, a number of utilities are provided: - The solutions of a query are displayed as ProFIT terms, not in the (hard to read) Prolog term representation - A pretty-printer for feature terms is provided - The output of the pretty-printer can be configured by the user - Cyclic terms can be printed out - Queries with ProFIT terms are accepted - Error messages will be provided in the next version (autumn 1994) ProFIT has been implemented in Sicstus Prolog (2.1 #9) and ProFIT is available free of charge by anonymous ftp (server: coli.uni-sb.de, directory: pub/profit). You can meet me and see a demo of the system - at the 4th Applied NLP Conference (Oct. 13-15 1994 in Stuttgart) - at the 1st meeting of the ALEP user group (Dec. 7-8 1994 in Luxembourg) Gregor Erbach --------------------------------------------------------------------------- * Gregor Erbach - Universitaet des Saarlandes - Computational Linguistics * * Im Stadtwald - POB 151150 - D-66041 Saarbruecken - Germany * * erbach@coli.uni-sb.de * Tel +49/681 302-4117 * Fax +49/681 302-4700 * * URL: http://coli.uni-sb.de/~erbach * ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
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