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.