Question

I’ve worked with the Xerox toolchain so far, which is powerful, not opensource, and a bit overkill for my current problem. Are there libraries that allow my to implement a phrase structure grammar? Preferably in ruby or lisp.

Answer 1

AFAIK, there’s no open-source Lisp phrase structure parser available.

But since a parser is actually a black box, it’s not so hard to make your application work with a parser written in any language, especially as they produce S-expressions as output. For example, with something like pfp you can just pipe your sentences as strings to it, then read and process the resulting trees. Or you can wrap a socket server around it and you’ll get a distributed system 🙂

There’s also cl-langutils, that may be helpful in some basic NLP tasks, like tokenization and, maybe, POS tagging. But overall, it’s much less mature and feature rich, than the commonly used packages, like Stanford’s or OpenNLP.