[ivan.moony]

Does anyone know of a good natural language resource from which I can extract English grammar? I think I had an AGFL link, but their site is not online anymore. Thanks in advance.

[Don Patrick]

I have no experience with it, but the industry standard and most recommended is Stanford's: http://nlp.stanford.edu/software/

[ivan.moony]

Tx, but Stanford's won't do.

I need some English grammar definition files for my Javascript project that would parse natural language and do some overlay logic inference in the same pass, by the same algorithm.

After hours of searching, the best thing I've found is free "treebank" files. Those files provide thousands of sentences whose words and sentence parts are annotated by: "noun", "verb", "adjective", "propositional phrase" and similar gradually granulated stuff, like in the following code:

Code

(S (NP (NNP John))
   (VP (VBZ loves)
       (NP (NNP Mary)))
   (. .))

From those files I can automatically construct the grammar for English language. The good news is that treebanks are popular on the web, maintained by influent organisations like universities, and they exist for a lot of different languages. I was hoping for some BNF-like rules, but I'll probably use treebanks if nothing else doesn't pop out. Maybe even to provide an arbitrary-treebank-use as a seed for generating grammar rules. Users might like it.

[infurl]

Here are two of the most advanced open source English parsers that are currently available.

http://ilexir.co.uk/applications/rasp/

http://www.nactem.ac.uk/tsujii/enju/

I've also written an extensive C library that parses English according to the rules laid out in "The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language" which is the most modern and complete descriptive grammar yet published. However it's still a work in progress and I'm not ready to release it yet. Here's an example of the output of my program:

<Clause>
   <Subject Clause_type='declarative' Number='plural' Person='third' Verb_type='complex_intransitive'>
      <Nominal Number='plural'>
         <Noun_BOX Case='plain_case' Category='common_noun' Number='plural' Number_type='count'>Boxes</Noun_BOX>
      </Nominal>
   </Subject>
   <Predicator Clause_type='declarative' Number='plural' Person='third' Verb_type='complex_intransitive'>
      <Verb_REST Number='plural' Person='third' Verb_form='present' Verb_type='complex_intransitive'>rest</Verb_REST>
   </Predicator>
   <Subjective>
      <Preposition_ON Category='preposition' Selects='Preposition_ON' grammaticised='yes' particle='yes'>on</Preposition_ON>
      <Determiner>
         <Determinative>
            <Determinative_THE Category='definite'>the</Determinative_THE>
         </Determinative>
      </Determiner>
      <Nominal Number='singular'>
         <Noun_TABLE Case='plain_case' Category='common_noun' Number='singular' Number_type='count'>table</Noun_TABLE>
      </Nominal>
   </Subjective>
</Clause>