LKB Wishlist

This page is for listing wishlist items in the LKB. Just because they are here doesn’t, of course, mean that anyone will implement them for you. In some cases, there has been relevant discussion on the developers mailing list (e.g., non-ASCII encodings).

  • Head-daughter shown in trees: It would be nice if the graphical display marked which daughter was the head daughter in headed constructions, either by a thicker branch to it or maybe an arrow. An alternative would be to label the arcs (H for head, S for subject, etc) but that would probably be overdoing things).
  • Some treatment of capitali(z|s)ation
  • Normalization of numbers e.g. PLUS (CARG 20 CARG 3) => CARG 23
  • Robust generation of numbers CARG 23 => PLUS (CARG 20 CARG 3)

  • Redundancy rule check: define a conventional syntax in the comments to suggest that a type is the combination of another type and a rule (or rules) and create a batch check to see if they are really the same, e.g.

    generic_adj_te_infl-lex := generic-i-adj-lex &
"combine: i-adj-stem-lex + adj-te-t-lexeme-c-stem-infl-rule; I am the generic type for te inflected adjectives, e.g. 美しく"
[RMORPH-BIND-TYPE t-morph,
 SYNSEM.LOCAL.CAT.HEAD i-adj_head & [MARK < [LOCAL.CAT.HEAD.H-TENSE te] > ],
 J-NEEDS-AFFIX +].
  • Linear precedence constraints: see LkbLpconstraints for a discussion document.
  • Filter in the generator that blocks application of lex rules which add constraints to e.g., PNG which are incompatible with the input. (This should keep edges corresponding to verbs inflection for the “wrong” agreement from overpopulating the gen-chart.) This turned out to be particularly problematic in Zulu, which inflects for both objects and subjects and makes a ~18-way distinction in each case.
  • treebanking support: provide ACE-like tsdb output? add support for connection to [incr() tsdb] and FFTB?
  • alternative web interface: would it be possible to have an alternative UI to the McCLIM? A web interface like what Babel2 (FCG implementation, one demo at

https://www.fcg-net.org/demos/planning/) does would be nice and may solve some problems with the fonts?!

  • shared configuration files: would it be possible for the LKB and ACE/PET to share some or all of their configuration files? For example, if the LKB could read the english.tdl file, …

In Progress / Done

  • Control over font size in show-gen-output windows: in LkbFos, these and other list-like windows (such as the ‘Apply all lex rules’ window) obey the *parse-tree-font-size* user parameter.
  • Comments in TDL: although the TdlRfc specification does not provide a way to comment out a section of TDL by wrapping it in a definition, LkbFos fully implements the BlockComment facility. There is partial support for block comments in the ‘classic’ LKB, but they are only allowed between definitions.
  • Support for multibyte encodings in the error messages: for TDL reading errors, the classic version of the LKB (unhelpfully) reports byte positions — LkbFos reports line numbers and character positions.
  • Consistent treatment of infl-pos: the user-defined function find-infl-pos controls location(s) of lexical rule application for multiwords. It seems to work as expected in parsing, but not in manual lexical rule application or generation. This issue is currently being fixed in LkbFos.

  • Proper support in the display/entry for non-ASCII encodings

    • entering text in the parse window
    • sentence display in the window-name
    • correct display in trees/feature structures
    • currently some support in Linux with Trollet, doesn’t work in windows for some (most?) encodings

    These points are (mostly) implemented in LkbFos, although some work is required to pre-select the Unicode fonts to be used.

  • Filter in parse chart windows to suppress lexical items with unfulfilled morphological rules otherwise the display is fairly unusable for grammars with a substantial number of orthographemic rules. In LkbFos, set the parameter *show-incomplete-lex-rule-chains* to NIL to stop such lexical items being displayed.

Last update: 2024-06-28 by John Carroll [edit]