GF 3.5 Release Notes

Installation

See the download page.

What's new

Over 400 changes have been pushed to the source repository since the release of GF 3.4.

GF compiler and run-time library

• The Haskell source code for GF now compiles with GHC 7.6 and hence the the latest Haskell Platform (2013.2.0.0). Compatibility with GHC 7.4 is also maintained.
• gf -s/-q now silences no linearization of ... warnings.
• Faster regular expression pattern matching in the grammar compiler.
• Two bugs in the partial evaluator that caused problems with pattern macros and variants have been fixed.
• A portability problem with PGF files has been fixed. It could cause problems when PGF files were produced on a 32-bit system and used on a 64-bit system.

• The new runtime in C (in /src/runtime/c/) is now stable enough to be used although there are still features from the Haskell runtime which are not ported yet. The new runtime provides the following new features:
  • state of the art statistical parser for GF (PMCFG)
  • the parser is usable in a robust mode, i.e. even if the sentence is not in the scope of the grammar it is still possible to get a list of parsable chunks
  • the linearizer is also more robust than the one in Haskell since it can linearize the partial trees returned from the robust parser
  • the exhaustive generation for GF abstract trees generates the trees in decreasing probability order (the order in Haskell is unspecified).
  • we have started using just-in-time compilation to native code in the exhaustive generator. The goal is to reach the state where GF will provide state of the art theorem prover.
• There is a binding from Python to the C runtime in /src/runtime/python/.
• A volunteer to complete the binding from Java is highly wanted, /src/runtime/java/.

Resource Grammar Library

• New languages in the Resource Grammar Library: Greek, Maltese (see the updated synopsis).
• Various improvements for several other languages.
• Updated web-based RGL browser (/lib/doc/browse/), with search-by-type and inbuilt syntax tree builder.

GF Cloud services

• Word alignment diagrams can now be restricted to a subset of the languages supported by the grammar.
• Minibar: you can now click on a linearization to obtain a table with all variants and forms.
• Support for cross-site HTTP requests.
• A UTF-8 decoding problem in gf -server has been fixed. It was caused by a backward incompatible change in network-2.4.1.1.
• Various other small improvements and bug fixes.

www.grammaticalframework.org