A Toolkit for Generating Sentences from Context-Free Grammars

Abstract

Producing sentences from a grammar, according to various criteria, is required in many applications. It is also a basic building block for grammar engineering. This paper presents a toolkit for context-free grammars, which mainly consists of several algorithms for sentence generation or enumeration and for coverage analysis for context-free grammars. The toolkit deals with general context-free grammars. Besides providing implementations of algorithms, the toolkit also provides a simple graphical user interface, through which the user can use the toolkit directly. The toolkit is implemented in Java and is available at http://lcs.ios.ac.cn/ ∼ zhiwu/toolkit.php. In the paper, the overview of the toolkit and the description of the GUI are presented, and experimental results and preliminary applications of the toolkit are also contained.

Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Natural Language Generation

“…The CFG specified in was implemented using the CFG Java tool (Xu et al, 2011). We used this tool for three main reasons: our grammar engine implementation was done in Java, so we wanted a Java tool as well; we wanted a small CFG implementation for reasonable performance; and their tool extended Purdom's algorithm to fulfill Context-Dependent Rule Coverage (CDRC), which generates more and simpler sentences.…”

Toward an NLG System for Bantu languages: first steps with Runyankore (demo)

“…We implemented the algorithms for verbalization and pluralization presented in (Byamugisha et al, 2016a;Byamugisha et al, 2016c) as a Java application. The CFG specified in (Byamugisha et al, 2016b) was implemented using the CFG Java tool (Xu et al, 2011). We used this tool for three main reasons: our grammar engine implementation was done in Java, so we wanted a Java tool as well; we wanted a small CFG implementation for reasonable performance; and their tool extended Purdom's algorithm to fulfill Context-Dependent Rule Coverage (CDRC), which generates more and simpler sentences.…”

Covering both stack and states while testing push-down systems

“…Test generation from a grammar is frequently used for generating structured inputs for example in [6] for testing parser or refactoring engines [7]. A generic tool exploiting coverage criteria for generating test data from grammars has been proposed in [8]. In [9][10] [11] several approaches for random testing from grammar specifications are proposed.…”