[developers] non-lisp programmatic interface to LKB?

[Stephan Oepen]

hi glenn,

> I seek a programmatic interface--for loading grammars, parsing, and
> obtaining trees and MRSs--from the LKB, and which is accessible from
> outside of Lisp. A socket interface or linkable C library would be
> preferable, but even crude stdin/stdout would work. Any such
> interface presumably implies some sort of binary or text (XML?)
> representation of feature structures, for which I might need
> documentation if the format is not self-evident.

i believe there are two such interfaces in the LKB.  several years ago,
i developed the so-called Linguistic Server Protocol (LSP), but i never
found the time to write up any documentation.  hence, it is officially
unsupported but should be functional.  i had posted  some background on
LSP and some examples (as an email attachment) to the `developers' list
on 17-oct-06.  you should be able to find this message and attachment
in the list archives, and if not please email me off-list.

LSP is not XML-based, and i believe ben waldron had started to create a
mechanism similar in spirit but using modern technology (at the cost of
some socket bandwidth :-); i cannot say how far he got on that project,
however.

finally, it is quite straightforward running the run-time binaries, and
connecting stdin and stdout to a pipe.  that way, the Lisp interpreter
is your programmatic interface :-).

                                                          best  -  oe

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