The various files which make up the program Chat-80 ===================================================

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Copyright (C) 1982

David Warren,

SRI International, 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park,

California 94025, USA;

Fernando Pereira,

Dept. of Architecture, University of Edinburgh,

20 Chambers St., Edinburgh EH1 1JZ, Scotland

This program may be used, copied, altered or included in other

programs only for academic purposes and provided that the

authorship of the initial program is aknowledged.

Use for commercial purposes without the previous written

agreement of the authors is forbidden.

_

File Purpose ==== =======

load.pl Compile this file to get a compiled Chat-80, interpret it to get an interpreted Chat-80.

clone.xg lex.xg The XG which defines the syntax accepted by Chat-80

clotab.pl Table of normal form modifier attachments

tlxgproc.pl This is a preprocessor to translate XGs into Prolog. If needed, it should be compiled separately. It defines the following evaluable predicates:-

+ File :	reads in File treating any grammar rules
                in it as XG rules;
list(File) :	writes out to File the Prolog clauses for
                the XG files read in so far.

xgrun.pl Defines the run time support predicates for XGs (see XGs paper).

newg.pl The Chat-80 grammar after preprocessing. It was obtained by typing the following:-

prolog
[tlxgproc].
+ 'clone.xg'.
+ 'lex.xg'.
list('newg.pl').

newdict.pl The syntactic dictionary. It defines both application-independent and application-dependent (world database) words.

slots.pl Determines what modifies what.

scopes.pl Determines the scopes of determiners and other operators, and produces an unsimplified query.

templa.pl Defines the meaning of the application-dependent words.

qplan.pl Optimises a simplified query.

talkr.pl Executes queries.

ndtabl.pl

Gives statistical information about the predicates in the world
database (and also some application-independent ones such as
'average'). This is used by the query optimiser.

A clause in ndtabl.pl has the form

nd(Predicate,PredSize,Dom1Size,...,DomkSize).

Predicate is the name of a database predicate of arity k.

PredSize, Dom1Size, ..., DomKSize measure the sizes of the
the predicate (number of solutions) and the sizes of the domains
for each argument (the number of distict values that argument
may take in a call to the predicate). we use a logarithmic
size measure

        s = 10 * log10(n)

where n is the actual size (number of solutions or number pf
distinct values) of a predicate or argument domain.

Thus

        nd(flows,19,16,22)

indicates that the binary predicate "flows" has around 80
solutions, and it is going to be called with its first
argument taken from a set with around 40 elements (number
of rivers in the database) and its second argument taken
from a set with around 158 elements (number of countries
in the database).

readin.pl Reads in sentences.

ptree.pl Prints out parse trees.

aggreg.pl Executes set operators such as 'average'.

world0.pl rivers.pl cities.pl countries.pl contain.pl borders.pl The world database.

newtop.pl Top level of Chat-80 and query simplifier. demo Sample queries. To run in batch mode, type

hi80(demo)

to the Prolog toplevel after loading Chat-80. log Output expected from `hi80(demo).'