[developers] Re: pending/674: generator broken on everything except the ERG?

[Ann Copestake]

> > The other thing is that it's apparently a lot slower with these
> > little grammars than it used to be.  I don't have timings for the old
> > version, but it now taking up to a minute to generate from an 8 word
> > sentence with the grammar that's supposed to be the end point of our
> > practicals - there are a lot of realisations, but I'm sure it wasn't
> > that slow before.
> 
> that sounds troubling.  the published claim is that we generate about
> twenty times faster now than things used to be.  do you have any kind
> of comparison data (actual timings, edge counts, whatever)?  where is
> the time spent currently?  if you provide the grammar and a pointer to
> an earlier LKB version that you know worked faster, i would be tempted
> to try and investigate this further.

I'm really sorry but there's no chance I can do this at the moment.
I'll happily send the grammar to anyone who wants to investigate.  (I
can't post it anywhere public in case one of our students finds it!)
I expect it is probably just a matter of setting the appropriate
globals etc, whatever they are, but I don't have time to find out at
the moment.

> 
> > could you keep me up to date by describing anything you check in over
> > the next few weeks, please?
> 
> yes, in fact i think it would be useful if we all made it a habit to
> email `developers' whenever we do something potentially relevant.  

I had in fact thought that we'd agreed months ago that that's what
we'd do.  I've been doing this routinely for some months and nobody
has complained yet, so I assume it is OK.  

I think that this is a much better mechanism than posting updates on
the wiki (LkbEvolution and whatever the other one is), since either
one has email notification set, in which case the email overload is
the same as with a mailing list (and it's more cumbersome to read the
item) or one could miss something new on the wiki.  So my feeling is
that, unless we can persuade someone to extract highlights from
developers to the wiki, I suggest we stick to using developers and get
rid of the wiki update pages, which are apparently used erratically.

Ann