GF Version 3.1.6 Release Notes

23 April 2010

Installation

The binaries now work out of the box for each platform and support completions (file names and parsing), because readline has been changed to haskeline.

To compile from source, GHC 6.12 is now required. But GHC is not needed if the binary executables are used.

Binaries (.gfo and .pgf files) compiled with GF 3.1 are incompatible with 3.1.6 and must either be removed; alternatively, the -src flag can be used when compiling.

Notice the new place to send bug reports (see GF's welcome message)!

New features

Grammar language

• improved support for dependent types (see SUMO, nqueens in examples)

Shell commands and options (see help in GF for more information)

• eb: example-based grammar file conversion (see examples/animals/QuestionI.gf)
• vd = visualize_dependency: show dependency tree
• vp = visualize_parse: show parse tree
• gr, gt, mq, tq: use a seed tree with metavariables
• gr, p, tq: use -probs=FILE to bias or rank generated trees
• gt now tries the different alternatives in the order in which they appear in the source code
• dg: hide modules when printing dependency graph
• -output-format=lambda_prolog let us to use Lambda Prolog for exhaustive generation with dependent types

Libraries

• Urdu completed (Shafqat Virk)
• Turkish morphology + Zamberek's dictionary in GF (Server Cimen)

Examples

• SUMO
• phrasebook
• nqueens

Internal

• single PMCFG format for both linearization and parsing
• use of Haskeline for completion - more portable than Readline
• unicode support from Haskell 6.12 instead of home-made coding

Issues

Javascript generation is not updated to the new PGF format. GF 3.1 should still be used for building Javascript applications.