This message announces a release of the Pleuk grammar development
system.  Pleuk is intended to be a shell for grammar development, in
that many different grammatical formalisms can be embedded within it.

The following grammatical formalisms currently work with Pleuk: 

Cfg	A simple context-free grammar system, intended for
	demonstration purposes. 

HPSG-PL	A system for developing HPSG-style grammars, produced at
	Simon Fraser University, Canada, by Fred Popowich, Sandi
	Kodric and Carl Vogel. 

Mike	A simple graph-based unification system, enhanced with
	additional operations for the treatment of free word order 
	proposed by Mike Reape in various publications.   

SLE	A graph-based formalism enhanced with arbitrary relations in
	the manner of Johnson and Rosner (EACL, 1989) and Doerre and
	Eisele.  Delayed evaluation is used to compute infinite
	relations.  This system has been used for the development of
	several HPSG-style grammars.

Term	A term-based unification grammar system, originally developed
	for the support of Unification Categorial Grammar (Zeevat,
	Klein and Calder).

Sample grammars are provided for all of these formalisms.  

Work continues apace on other formalisms, including Bob Carpenter's
Ale system for typed feature structures, and Veronica Dahl's Static
Discontinuity Grammars. 

In designing Pleuk, we have attempted to make no assumptions as to the
syntax and semantics of grammar formalisms.  This means that Pleuk
gives relatively little support for the detailed operations of
particular grammars---the formalism has to supply parsers and
generators.  We do provide relatively sophisticated support for
manipulating grammars as a whole (in terms of the files that define
some grammar), interacting with analysers for those grammars and for
the display of grammatical definitions or the results of analysis.
The latter is achieved by means of a printer specifically designed for
representing information in conventional linguistic terms, e.g.
attribute-value diagrams, trees, sets, sequences and arrangements of
these.

We are making Pleuk available to the computational linguistics
community in the hope that it will provide a set of facilities for the
production of new grammar formalisms.  We also expect that certain of
its components will be easily reused in other systems.  

Pleuk requires SICStus prolog version 2.1#6 or later, plus a variety
of ancillary programs available free of charge from many FTP servers.
Pleuk is (or shortly will be) available via FTP from the German
Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

ftp.dfki.uni-sb.de

and also from Edinburgh University

spark.cogsci.ac.uk

in directory pub/pleuk

For more information, send email to pleuk@cogsci.ed.ac.uk.  

Jo Calder			jcalder@cs.sfu.ca
School of Computing Science
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, BC
Canada, V5A 1S6

Kevin Humphreys			kwh@cogsci.ed.ac.uk
Centre for Cognitive Science
University of Edinburgh
2 Buccleuch Place
Edinburgh
Scotland EH8 9LW

Chris Brew 			chrisbr@cogsci.ed.ac.uk
Language Technology Group
Human Communication Research Centre
University of Edinburgh
2 Buccleuch Place
Edinburgh
Scotland EH8 9LW

Mike Reape			mreape@cs.tcd.ie
Computer Science
Trinity College 
Dublin