1LINK-PARSER(1) General Commands Manual LINK-PARSER(1)
2
6 link-generator - generate natural language sentences using Link Grammar
7
9 link-generator --help
10 link-generator --version
11
13 link-generator is a command-line tool for generating random sentences
14 whose syntax is determined by the specified link-grammar dictionary.
15
17 link-generator
18
20 The theory of Link Grammar is explained in many academic papers. In
21 the first of these, Daniel Sleator and Davy Temperley, "Parsing English
22 with a Link Grammar" (1991), the authors defined a new formal grammati‐
23 cal system called a "link grammar". A sequence of words is in the lan‐
24 guage of a link grammar if there is a way to draw "links" between words
25 in such a way that the local requirements of each word are satisfied,
26 the links do not cross, and the words form a consistent connected
27 graph. The authors encoded English grammar into such a system, and
28 wrote the link-parser command-line tool to parse English using this
29 grammar.
30 The engine that performs the parsing is separate from the dictionaries
32 describing a language. Currently, the most fully developed, complete
33 dictionaries are for the English and Russian languages, although exper‐
34 imental, incomplete dictionaries exist for German and eight other lan‐
35 guages.
36
39 link-generator generates sentences.
40
43 --help Print usage and exit.
44 --version
46 Print program version and configuration details, and exit.
47 --usage
49 Print a short synposis of the option flags.
50 -l language|dict_location, --language=language|dict_location
52 Specify the language to use, or the directory file-path to the
53 dictionary to use.
54 -s length, --length=length
56 Specify the length of the sentences to generate. All generated
57 sentences will have exactly this length.
58 -c count, --count=count
60 Specify the number of sentences to generate. If this number is
61 less than the number of possible linkages, then a random subset
62 of possible linkages will be generated, and one representative
63 sentence for each linkage will be printed. The words in the rep‐
64 resentative sentence are randomly chosen from the set of words
65 associated with each disjunct in that linkage. If the count is
66 greater than the number of possible linkages, then one represen‐
67 tative sentence for each linkage will be printed.
68 If the -x option is set, and if the count is greater than the
70 number of possible linkages, then more than one representative
71 sentence will be printed for each linkage. Each sentence will
72 consist of word choices drawn randomly from the set of words as‐
73 sociated with each disjunct. An approximately equal number of
74 sentences will be printed for each linkage; if the count is high
75 enough, then all possible word-choices will be printed. Note
76 that this typically results in a combinatorial explosion!
77 -x, --explode
80 If set, and is the count is greater than the number of possible
81 linkages, then more than one sentence will be printed for each
82 linkage. Each sentence will have a distinct random word-choice
83 for that linkage.
84
87 The link-parser is a command-line tool for parsing sentences. It
88 provides some additional information about the link-grammar
89 implementation.
90 Information on the link-grammar shared-library API and the link types
92 used in the parse is available at the AbiWord website
93 ⟨http://www.abisource.com/projects/link-grammar/⟩.
94 Peer-reviewed papers explaining Link Grammar can be found at original
96 CMU site ⟨http://www.link.cs.cmu.edu/link/papers⟩.
97 The source code of link-generator and the link-grammar library is lo‐
99 cated at GitHub ⟨https://github.com/opencog/link-grammar⟩.
100 The mailing list for Link Grammar discussion is at link-grammar Google
102 group ⟨http://groups.google.com/group/link-grammar?hl=en⟩.
103
105 The link-grammar library were written by Daniel Sleator
106 <sleator@cs.cmu.edu>, Davy Temperley <dtemp@theory.esm.rochester.edu>,
107 and John Lafferty <lafferty@cs.cmu.edu>. The link-generator tool was
108 created by Amir Plivatsky <amirpli_at_gmail.com>.
109 This manual page was written by Ken Bloom <kbloom@gmail.com>, for the
111 Debian project, and updated Linas Vepstas <linasvepstas@gmail.com>.
112Version 5.9.0 2021-03-30 LINK-PARSER(1)