PAWS Starter Kit

As the name of the starter kit indicates, the Parser and Writer for Syntax (PAWS) has two purposes and two outputs:

The Writer produces a rough draft of a grammar of the syntax of your language, based on the answers to the questions in each section of PAWS. This output file is in XLingPaper xml format. (See http://www.sil.org/~blacka/xlingpap/index.htm.)
The Parser produces all the files needed for using the PC-PATR syntactic parser for parsing and disambiguation within CARLA Studio.

Requirements:

Windows XP or greater
256 MB RAM
800 X 600 video graphics
.Net Framework Version 2.0
Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher
the MSXML package
20 MB free space on hard drive for PAWS itself

Features:

The task of writing a grammar for a language can seem so overwhelming that many give up without even trying. Completing and revising a draft is a much less daunting task, and the PAWS Starter Kit can provide that needed head start.

The PAWS Starter Kit takes advantage of XML technologies to create “actionable” knowledge which can be turned into a draft of a grammar write-up as well as a draft of a grammar file that can be used by the PC-PATR syntactic parsing program. If you are not interested in doing syntactic parsing, you can merely ignore that part of the PAWS Starter Kit and just work on producing the written grammar draft. (See Black and Black (2009) for an explanation; see also Simons and Black (2008) and Black (2008)).

The PAWS Starter Kit consists of a series of web pages that explain and illustrate the syntactic issues to be covered by the section and then has a series of multiple-choice questions about what happens in the language the user is studying. The user is also requested to provide example sentences and words.

For example, consider the opening page on adjectives and adjective phrases. It begins as shown in (1).

(1)

This explains and illustrates what this major section is about. Scrolling down, we see the rest of this page.

(2)

Notice that there is a place to key examples from the language of study and there are also multiple choice questions. The PAWS Starter Kit uses Unicode so it can handle most language scripts. It also works with Keyman 6. The number of questions depends on how previous questions have been answered. For example, if we select the second choice (“Yes - only certain degree words, though”), we might get the following:

(3)

There are now additional questions to answer. In addition, there are instructions in red telling you how to enhance your AMPLE dictionary to be able to use the automatically generated PC-PATR grammar. If all you are interested in is the automatically generated grammar write-up, then you can ignore all the instructions that are in red.

When you are done with one page, you click on the Next button and go on to the next page.

By merely working one’s way through the PAWS Starter Kit , one can relatively quickly obtain a draft of a grammar write-up.

Installation:

The PAWS Starter Kit version 0.6 uses the .Net Framework Version 2.0 (which is also used by the SIL FieldWorks Language Explorer tool). If you do not already have .Net 2.0 installed on your machine, the PAWS installer will download it for you. (Be aware that it is large, about 22 MB.)

The PAWS Starter Kit version 0.6 has been tested on Windows XP and Windows Vista. If you have an older version of Windows, contact . PAWS also requires some other software which may already be on your machine (if you've installed FieldWorks Language Explorer, you should already have these):

You need Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher. Use this URL to obtain version 7.0: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/default.asp.

You need the MSXML package to be installed. See here.

You also need to install the PAWS Starter Kit itself, of course. This is in the PAWSSKInstall directory. Download and unzip the PAWSSKInstaller.zip file. Then just double click on the Setup.exe file and follow the instructions.

If you have installed an earlier alpha version of PAWS and want to upgrade, please contact and tell him which version you are upgrading from.

If you've installed PAWS Beta version 0.5.2, then you can install PAWS version 0.6 without uninstalling version 0.5.2 should you so wish. Any answer files from version 0.5.2 should work just fine with version 0.6.

Performing the steps outlined above will complete the installation process.

Use with CARLAStudio:

Note that to use the PAWS-generated PC-PATR grammar file within a CARLAStudio setup, do the following while running CARLAStudio:

Go to Language Model / Language / Analysis Sequence...
Click on the AMPLE process.
Click on the "Insert After..." button.
Select the PC-PATR DLL process and click OK.
Double click on the PC-PATR Disambiguate processor and use the Browse button to navigate to the PAWS-generated grammar file. Click on OK.
Click on OK.

The next time you process a file, it should invoke PC-PATR.