I See Dead Code

Q: “How many constituent trees fit on a single A0 poster in style?”
A: “886”

Disclaimer

Just to be clear, this is really old work. I just happened to find the old draft in my WordPress instance and regenerated the poster.

Genesis

Back in 2009, I had entertained the idea of pretty-printing parts of the SMULTRON treebank onto a large poster for quite some time. While there had always been PDF export in the TreeAligner (well-demonstrated in Marek, T; Lundborg, J; Volk, M (2008)), the code base had technical restrictions that made rendering large amounts of graphs infeasible. With the new Qt backend that was eventually used for the work in Marek, T; Schneider, G; Volk, M (2009), rendering large scenes became feasible; and after wasting a lot of paper, the first version of this poster was presented during the Research Day of the CompSci department of the University of Zürich in September 2009 (the original might still exist, but it is not in my possession), to a largely confused, but well-meaning audience.

Mass Production

The original did not have the nice, dynamically-spaced trees and no colors, logos, legends or URLs. After more iterations, we ended up with the final layout as shown in the PDF, of which ten A0 posters were printed. One poster was given to the Linguistics Department of the University of Konstanz, one to the Department of Corpus Linguistics and Morphology at the Humboldt University in Berlin, on to the Theoretical Computational Linguistics Group in Tübingen, and one poster was presented¹ at TLT8 at the Catholic University of Milano and left there as a gift. Two others were sent to SMULTRON collaborators in Sweden. When I left UZH in the May of 2010, the three leftover posters were still in my old office; I do not know what has become of them.

Tech

The underlying code doing the rendering is still available as part of TreeQuest, which itself never saw a public release and may warrant a post of its own at some point. The rendering is done using Qt4, whose graphics facilities I have in fonder memory than the Cairo API. The actual code for creating the layout has not been publicly released, any requests for it should go to the Department of Computational Linguistics at UZH. The number of graphs being rendered, sizes of graphical elements and line lengths have all been hand-tweaked extensively. There is also an A3 variant available, which has been used as advertisement for MTLA as far as I know.

The treebank data used is version 2.0.1 of SMULTRON. I do not know of any significant changes in version 3.0 that would make it unusable for the script.

1. I still feel bad about this since I cheated my way into the poster session, not having handed it in before, but presenting it anyway at the insistence of the organizers. [↩]