Dynamic Syntax

A Prolog Implementation of Dynamic Syntax

Dynamic Syntax: the Flow of Language Understanding (Kempson, Meyer-Viol, Gabbay, 2001)

You can enter full sentences, fragments or individual words. You will be able to add more text incrementally later (the parse trees stay in memory).
You will also be able to generate strings from the parse trees (with any luck, getting back what you originally put in ...)

The lexicon currently includes:

Names	Nouns	Verbs	Pronouns	Misc
john bill mary london paris europe january february	aeroplane airplane boat car plane train book hotel room table ticket trip boy girl student sugar travel	arrive begin book dislike fly hate leave like sneeze snore start stay think travel want wonder	i he her him it me she you	what who which that a an the every no some

Some example sentences that work:
"john snores"
"john likes mary"
"mary john likes"
"john thinks mary likes bill"
"john who snores sneezed"
"john who hates bill thinks mary likes him"
"a student who hates travel thinks mary likes the hotel"
"a boy who hates a hotel thinks mary likes the hotel that he hates"

and remember, DS is incremental! You can start with "john", or just "the", and see how the trees are built up as you go on. Turn on "show all trees" if you're really interested.

I'm afraid the tree printing display is very primitive - it works fine for simple sentences, but for more complex ones the nodes start nudging each other across the page.

Multiple trees will be given for many of the more complex examples, due to ambiguity caused by (a) restrictive vs. non-restrictive relative readings, and (b) rather weak attempts at pronoun resolution.

Problems, comments, suggestions: mpurver AT dcs.qmul.ac.uk

Enter text to parse:
Context:	Trees to display:	Tree printing:
None Previous sentence only Entire history	Show all trees Show complete trees when available, otherwise a selection Show only complete trees Show only the most likely tree	Display plain text trees Display graphical trees