Abstract Breugel
The Performance Grammar Workbench (PGW) is an interactive graphical system for developing and testing the lexicon and the syntax rules for a Performance Grammar (PG) generator or parser. It allows the grammar developer to add new lexical entries -- so-called 'lexical frames' -- and to define their morphological and syntactic properties in - user-friendly ways.Lexical frames are unordered trees whose branches can be displayed on the computer screen in arbitrary left-to-right order. The user can activate and manipulate lexical frames and their branches by simple drag&drop operations within the work area, for instance, in order to assemble and display the syntactic trees of complete sentences.
While the user attempts to combine lexical frames into larger trees, the PGW maintains the grammatical integrity of the emerging structure by continuous on-line checks of all hierarchical and linear constraints. At any point in time, the system is able to generate all possible strings allowed by the currently combined lexical frames, and to display the corresponding trees in visually attractive and transparant diagrams. The PGW thus provides the grammar developer with efficient tools for testing and improving collections of lexical items and syntactic rules.
The PGW has been implemented as a Java applet running under modern WWW browsers.
Last modified $Date: 2001/10/04 13:39:43 $ by Parlevink Webmaster