Beta: Tool for a Linguist

Added to my reading list! I'm trying to plow through a mountain of data already. Seems that for every theory you'll find that suits 10 more follows as a consequence.

Finnish as it happens have some interesting roots as it happens. It is not an indo european language. As it happens I am in Turkey and recently found out of a theory that it was in fact related to Turkish. I believe that modern lingustic in Finland at least has discarded this theory. From what I have heard it was part of the Finnish-Ugrig tree. Might be a political aspect of it since this was made in the heyday of modern nationalistic thinking so the turks maybe wanted their version of panslavism...

As it happens I am the lookout for a more dynamic way of correcting grammar and more importantly providing predictions. It seems that doing a hardcoded model is far to much work (I'm doing this solo) and also to rigid. As it doesn't allow for play on words take intentional language changes into account and works like crap with dialects.

So I haven't gotten to the grammmmar part just yet. But would this be a part in state of the art grammar correction?

Beta looks like a tool that does term rewriting, extended with a state machine to choose which grammar. From the document:

The Beta program first reads in the rules and then performs the transformations to the input data as defined by the rules.

Beta rule grammars may be written to perform various kinds of tasks, including data conversion, extracting interesting examples out of text data, modelling morphological structures or processes and selecting correct readings of ambiguous word tokens and parsing surface syntactic structures of sentences. Thus, the Beta program can be used both for tasks for generating and for analyzing linguistic expressions.

I would give it a slightly different name, like "AlphaBeta".

Just "Beta" makes me subconsciously assume the tool isn't finished yet.

Looks interesting! Thanks!