AGFL under GPL

The purpose of this article is to announce the availability of the AGFL Grammar Work Lab under the GNU Public Licence, making it publicly and freely available as a tool for linguistic research and for the development of NLP-based applications. The AGFL system is the first parser-generator for natural languages available under the GPL.

The run-time system for the generated parsers has been brought under the Lesser GPL, so that parsers by the system may be included in other systems (even commercially) under very liberal conditions.

The system comes with a number of grammars and lexica for free, in particular the EP4IR (English Phrases for Information Retrieval) grammar of English. Linguists and Computer Scientists alike are invited to use the AGFL system and the accompanying EP4IR grammar and lexicon of English for whatever purpose they like, including commercial purposes, as long as the GPL is adhered to. Linguists are invited to make and share improvements to the free grammars and lexica, or add new grammars and lexica in the same spirit.