I See Dead Code

Just this week, our paper „Extending the TIGER Query Language with Universal Quantification” for KONVENS ‘08 has been accepted. The abstract:

The query language in TIGERSearch is limited due to its lack of universal quantification. This restriction makes it impossible to ask simple queries like „Find sentences that do not include a certain word”. We propose an easy way to formulate such queries. We have implemented this extension to the query language in a tool that allows querying parallel treebanks including their alignment constraints. Our implementation of universal quantification relies on the view of node sets rather than single node unification. Our query tool is freely available.

This means that I’ll likely be in Berlin for the conference early October.

I haven’t really managed to do a lot of interesting things for the TreeAligner lately. The query evaluation for complex queries should be a little faster due to a smarter algorithm/data structure, we now have Undo/Redo support (shamelessly copying over all the frameworks from the Eclipse people, only with less code) and the tree renderer is a little faster.

The next step now should be the web-based query server so that interested researchers can try out the query evaluator without having to download the TreeAligner package and going through the hassle of installing GTK+ on Windows.