GF 3.8 Release Notes

June 2016

Installation

Roughly 400 changes have been pushed to the source repository since the release of GF 3.7.1 in October 2015.

GF shell: vd can now output universal dependency diagrams in various formats, see help vd.
The C runtime now includes an experimental library for managing and querying ontologies built on top of the abstract syntax of a grammar. Since the ontology is based on an abstract syntax, it is language independent by design. For now the library is only used in the GF Offline Translator. The library uses the B-tree backend of SQLite which makes it scalable even for non-trivial ontologies.

GF shell: a simple post-processing step has been added in the cc command to try compute pre{...} tokens instead of leaving them uninterpreted.
GF shell: an argument parsing problem has been fixed in the cc command. The problem was introduced before the release of GF 3.7.1 and prevented commands like cc "last" and cc "last"++"year" from working, but they should work again now.
Python binding: with the OS X installer package (gf-3.8.pkg), the Python binding should now work directly out of the package. (The installer puts the modules under /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages, where the Python interpreter can find them.)
Various improvements and bug fixes in the C run-time system and its bindings to other languages.

New languages:
- Nynorsk by Stian Rødven Eide (fairly complete, supports API)
- Ancient Greek by Hans Leiß (partial, no API yet)
- Slovene by Krasimir Angelov (partial, no API yet, donated by Digital Grammars)
Various fixes for several languages.
- English and Scandinavian: relative clauses and slash questions have been modernized to using preposition stranding by default. This also enables the use of that in English, which solves a problem of choosing between which and who when animacy information is not available. The previous defaults (which,who,whom, pied piping) are available in Extra modules.
Numerous fixes in the translation dictionaries.
- two new wide-coverage languages: Estonian and Russian
- The abstract syntax of the translation dictionary is now annotated with glosses, examples and sense IDs from WordNet. This gives us a basis on how to choose the best translations for different languages.
- We have started splitting many of the lexical entries in the abstract syntax of the dictionary into different entries for senses that translate differently accross languages.

GF Offline Translator (for Android) now includes a user interface similar to the Phrasomatic. This lets the user explore the controlled language fragment of the wide coverage grammar. Althought the code is already there, the new release of the app will be postponed to get some of its other features stable.
GF Offline Translator (for Android) now offers glosses and examples for most of its lexical items. This means that now it can be used as a more explanatory dictionary.
Minibar can now show universal dependency diagrams for grammars that support it (e.g. the ResourceDemo grammar).
PGF service: there is a new command deptree that can output universal dependency diagrams for grammars that support it (there has to be a label configuration file).
Wide Coverage Translation Demo: there is now a new button "Grammars..." which show a list where users can select which application grammars to use for translation, in addition to the wide coverage grammar. Application grammars can give higher quality translations in the domain they cover. You can change the order in which the selected grammars are tried by dragging them up and down in the list.