Background

OpenALP is a collection of tools for generating grammatical structures from example text of a given language. In traditional Natural Language Processing it takes large teams of people years to perfect a rule based grammar for a single language.

The Aim

OpenALP aims to address the the time required to build these grammars by working backwards, taking a large set of text from a language and building the grammar, as a graph. From there we can use that for grammar checking directly in applications like OpenOffice, or convert it to form rules for integration into more traditional NLP applications.

Sub Dialects

One of the more unique aspects to this is it makes it very easy to create sub-dialects of a language, by only feeding in a certain type of text. The primary focus of the prototype release is to be able to parse Academic Essays. This means we will be able to plug in to OpenOffice, start writing an essay and have it let us know when we, for instance start talking in first person.

News

April 21th 2009

OpenOffice has been dropped. There were too many problems encountered with integrating with the OpenOffice dictionary and being able to add words and sentences to the grammar from OO. We have now started to implement our own simple text editor.

April 15th 2009

The OpenOffice Plugin actually does stuff. We can now check simple sentances against the grammar from within OpenOffice. But wait theres more! Javadocs are now accessible online directly from SVN.

April 6th 2009

We finally have a proof of concept for the OpenOffice Plugin, dosent to much but its a big leap forward for risk mitigation. Shouldnt be long before we can parse some sentances from within OpenOffice.