History

The LKB was originally developed by AnnCopestake (as part of the ACQUILEX project) at the University of Cambridge. She continues to work on the system, but in the mid- and late 1990s, the software was substantially extended in terms of functionality and processing efficiency by JohnCarroll, RobMalouf and StephanOepen. Most of this work was performed under the auspices of the LinGO Laboratory at Stanford University. DanFlickinger, the main developer of the LinGO English Resource Grammar, has had a great deal of influence on LKB system design. As part of the EU Deep-Thought project, BenWaldron became involved with LKB development (specifically, he took over development of the lexical database; see the LkbLexDb page) and has since been an active contributor. The current distribution also includes code by others, most notably BerndKiefer, FrederikFouvry and EmilyBender.

The LKB has a reasonably active user base with an estimated several hundred installations world-wide. Part of the LKB source code is used as a post-processor in the PET run-time engine (used by several active projects) and for the creation of MRS representations on top of the Xerox Linguistic Environment (XLE) in the LOGON machine translation effort. Accordingly, there are a variety of channels that may be suited for communication regarding LKB matters.

Communication with (LKB) Developers

To report problems with the LKB software (or other LinGO resources) or inquire about specific aspects of its use (including donations to the development team), please use the email address lingo@delph-in.net. Use this address rather than mailing to an individual. We will try to respond to all messages eventually, but cannot guarantee to do so!

Communication with Other (LKB) Users

The LKB mailing list is for messages directly related to the LKB grammar development environment, including questions that other users might be able to respond to, bug reports of general interest (please always copy to the lingo email address), announcements of fixes, new releases etc. All LKB users are encouraged to subscribe. Note that you cannot mail to the list without being a subscriber (of course you can unsubscribe at any time). Messages may be held for moderation. Anything you post to the list will be archived.

Bug reporting

Before reporting a bug, please read the manual carefully (it may be a feature …). Then check LkbFaq to see if someone has raised your problem already. If you are running a non-current version of the LKB, you might like to upgrade to the latest version and see whether the bug has been fixed. (You do not absolutely have to do this before reporting a bug, but we do not provide patches for earlier versions, and we will only try and debug problems that we can reproduce in the current version.) If none of this answers your question, please send a description of the problem to lingo@delph-in.net with as much detail as possible and in particular giving a verbatim report of any error messages. Make sure you mention whether you are running source or one of the images and state the operating system. You may be asked to provide sample grammars that illustrate the problem. Do not send bug reports to any individual developer: at best they will be forwarded to the lingo address, and at worst ignored.

Last update: 2011-10-09 by anonymous [edit]