HPSG Diagrams

[Georgia]

Excellent idea!
Meanwhile, the EQ "code" Piotr Banski cites doesn't look any less "arcane"
than LaTeX to me, and I think there might be LaTeX for Windows.

Georgia

----- Original Message -----
From: "Luis Casillas" <casillas at stanford.edu>
To: <hpsg-l at lists.Stanford.EDU>
Sent: Monday, December 02, 2002 8:05 PM
Subject: Re: HPSG Diagrams


> On Mon, Dec 02, 2002 at 04:37:48PM -0800, Paul Kay wrote:
>
> > Luis's observation that this barrier operates at the graduate student
> > level, and thus might influence career choices, is disturbing if one
> > wants to see the HPSG community grow.
>
> A point of clarification: the course I was talking about is an undergrad
> intro to syntax course.  At Stanford most grad students certainly have
> to figure out some way of doing AVMs, but it's a particularly good
> environment to do so, since you are surrounded by the day-to-day life of
> the HPSG and LFG communities; you go next door and you ask somebody how
> to do it.
>
> My concern is in general for people who don't have such a resource, of
> which the undergrads I mentioned were only one case.  Grad students are a
> great example too, but I think in general people who are interested in
> HPSG are not necessarily interested in learning an arcane typesetting
> system from the the early 80s with an interminable array of third party
> add ons.
>
> This all boils down to something I've been telling Ivan for a while:
> somebody should write a grant proposal and get money for a project on
> computer-assisted education for syntactic theory, based on HPSG.  Then
> you pay a few bright CS undergrads and pay them to help you design and
> write an application that does things like the following:
>
> 1. Allow the user to define types, constraints and hierarchies with
>    graphical editors.
> 2. Allow the user to enter tree structures in a tree editor, with nodes
>    labeled by AVMs (the common notational convention in HPSG).
> 3. Check whether a tree satisfies the constraints in a grammar.
> 4. Output all these graphical representations in formats suitable for
>    importing into other software.
> 5. Support downloading problem sets from a central server, and
>    submitting answers online for automatic correction.
> 6. Work on something other than Unix, and not require immense amounts
>    of RAM or processor power.
>
> This kills many birds with just one rock: it would be useful both for
> students doing a course based on something like Sag and Wasow's
> textbook, but also for people in general as a tool one could use just
> to draw AVMs and trees for one's papers, output them, check that
> they license the structures you think they do, etc.  Also, I think it
> would raise the bar in general for the teaching of linguistics.
>
> --
> Luis Casillas
> Department of Linguistics
> Stanford University
> http://www.stanford.edu/~casillas/
>