Recipes for the impatients

The best way to play with FRMG is to use the parsing interface available on this wiki, also accessible in the left side panel. The Schema menu allows you to select an ouput schema. The other options activate extra functionalities, such as returning partial parses when no complete parse can be found for a sentence (robust mode). Some of these functionalities are still experimental, like the advanced mode for dealing with ellipses in coordinations, renaming some edges, or removing some edges and nodes (essentially the nodes corresponding to non-lexicalized trees represented by empty pseudo-anchors).

More information about using the interface may be found here. In particular, it is possible to switch to full-screen or to fold a tree to focus on the interesting parts. A parse can also be edited, either by exploring parse alternatives (just click on a target node to see all potential incoming dependency edges) or even by adding or deleting edges. Finally, the edges may be highlighted, an interesting functionality to point to errors (in a discussion) or to pinpoint the key characteristics of a syntactic phenomena (its signature)

The parsing interface actually calls a cruder but more complete parsing service available here.

FRMG Wiki also provides a service to process small corpora (less than one million words). Il allows to upload a corpus and get the parse results (as an archive) when parsed. It also possible to consult the results online and to query them using the DPath query language, inspired by XPath (with its navigation axes).

Recipes for the geeks

For the courageous, it is possible to install the full processing chain developed by the ALPAGE team, including FRMG.

All needed packages are freely available under open-source licenses. They may be fetched from INRIA GForge and compiled under Linux and Mac OS environments. The process is however largely automated with the help of the alpi installer, a Perl script that does the job of fetching and compiling the Alpage packages and some other dependent packages (mostly Perl ones).

The alpi script may be found here (Note:it is strongly advised to use the version that is available under SVN). Please note that the compilation of some components (in particular FRMG) requires a relatively powerful computer, with RAM (2 to 4 Go) and disk (at least 10Go). Fortunately, the run time requirements for using the chain are more reasonable !

To install the chain with alpi, fetching the sources from the SVN repositories:

perl ./alpi --svn=anonymous --prefix=<where to install>

For more info, use

perldoc ./alpi

or

perl ./alpi --help

In case of problem, please contact me by mail, attaching the file 'alpi.log' produced by alpi.

To have more information about using the chain once installed, please have a look here (in French)