How to Read this Manual

This manual is designed to help you use the FUF package and to describe and explain the technique of unification grammars.

The FUF package is made available to people interested in text generation and/or functional unification. It can be used:

• as a front-end to a text generation system, providing a surface realization component. SURGE, a grammar of English with large syntactic coverage written in FUF, is included for that purpose.

• as an environment for grammar development. People interested in expressing grammatical theories or developing a practical grammar can experiment with the unifier and linearizer.

• as an environment for a study of functional unification. Functional unification is a powerful technique and can be used for non-linguistic or non-grammatical applications.

This manual contains material for people falling in any of these categories. It starts with an introduction to functional unification, its syntax, semantics and terminology. The following chapters deal with the ``grammar development'' tools: tracing and indexing, a presentation of the morphology component and the dictionary. The next two chapters present the novel features of FUF: typing and control facilities. A chapter is devoted to typing in FUF: type definition, user-defined unification methods and expression of complete information. One chapter is devoted to to flow of control specification (indexing, dependency-directed backtracking and goal freezing). Finally the last chapter is a reference manual to the package. One appendix is devoted to possible non-linguistic applications of the formalism, and compares the formalism with programming languages, in particular with PROLOG.

Note that this manual does not describe or document the example grammars provided as examples with the unifier. The sample grammars contain a brief documentation on-line and are accompanied by example inputs. The SURGE grammar is documented in a separate manual.