FftbTop

FFTB: the full forest treebanker

FFTB is a tool for treebanking with DELPH-IN grammars that allows the selection of an arbitrary tree from the "full forest" without enumerating/unpacking all analyses in the parsing stage. FFTB is partly integrated with [incr tsdb()] and the LOGON tree; for details on using FFTB through that toolchain, please see LogonAnswer.

FFTB on OSX

It is possible to use FFTB independently of the LOGON tree, either on Linux or on Mac OS X. The instructions below explain how to install and launch FFTB on OSX. Note that although the treebanking user interface presented by FFTB will be identical regardless of whether the LOGON tree is used, some of the ancillary steps, such as preparing a full-forest profile to use with FFTB, may be quite different when the LOGON tree is not used. Such methods are experimental and not (yet) discussed here.

• Download http://sweaglesw.org/linguistics/osx-fftb.tar.gz

• $ cd osx-fftb

• $ export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=./dependencies/

• $ ./fftb -g erg-1214.dat --browser path/to/profile

The adventurous can attempt to compile and run a standalone fftb on linux from the SVN repository: http://sweaglesw.org/svn/treebank/trunk

FFTB for bridging analyses (self-help robust treebanking)

As of 1214, the ERG includes (disabled by default) so-called bridging rules which enable a parse to be found for any input string, with degraded semantic usefulness. There is currently no parse selection model trained to function properly with these rules enabled, so they should be disabled when the ERG is used in an online processing environment. However, in an offline treebanking environment, these rules enable annotators to capture some of the correct semantics for ungrammatical sentences even when a fully correct analysis is not available. In the future, it may be possible to use such annotations to train an automatic parse selection model to work with the bridging rules.

If a profile has been parsed to include an "edge" relation using the bridging rules, and erg-1214-bridge.dat is an ACE grammar image with the relevant rules enabled, it is possible to update the profile from a non-bridged one and continue annotating the rejected sentences with a command like this:

 fftb --suppress-bridges -g erg-1214-bridge.dat --gold path/to/previous-profile path/to/new-profile-with-bridging 

The --suppress-bridges option causes FFTB to assume a discriminant has been selected for each sentence rejecting the bridging rule at the top level span. This should cause the update to behave exactly as if the bridging rules had not been enabled in parsing the new profile. After updating, you can rerun without that option (and also without the --gold ... option), or you can manually disable that discriminant each time you visit a rejected item that you want to reclaim.