TRALE is an extension of the ALE system that supports some extra functionality (most importantly, complex-antecedent constraints), and that automatically adds extra constraints to grammars in order to enforce the view of subtyping standardly assumed in Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. TRALE is implemented as a pre-processor for ALE that intercepts certain grammar clauses at compile-time to generate extra code for the ALE compiler. This code is used internally -- no new ALE grammar is generated. As a result of TRALE's different view of subtyping, many grammars will behave very differently with TRALE than they do with ALE .
The sections of this manual marked either with TRALE-EXTENSION (HTML) or with a T page-number prefix (PS, PDF) describe these extra features. Complex-antecedent constraints are discussed in Section T4.3. Subtype covering constraints, and the HPSG style of subtyping that they support are discussed in Section T4.1.2. They also present some extra syntactic constructs that TRALE can use, including signature declaration files (Section T4.1), logical-variable macros, macro hierarchies and macro generation tools (Section T4.2).
The Grisu graphical interface that is distributed with TRALE is described in Chapter E.
Grisu was developed by Holger Wunsch of Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen and Detmar Meurers of Ohio State University. The signature file parser was developed as part of the ConTroll system by Thilo Götz, Stephan Kepser, Dale Gerdemann, and Detmar Meurers at Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen. The macro hierarchy and macro generation components were developed by Detmar Meurers. The lexical rule compiler described in Chapter 7 was developed by Detmar Meurers, Vanessa Metcalf and Markus Dickinson of Ohio State University. Integration of [incr tsdb()] and the DFKI graphical parsing chart display was performed by Stefan Müller of Universität Bremen, based in part upon earlier work by Frederik Fouvry at Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen.