FEGRAMED : an interactive graphics editor for feature structures

Abstract

Many linguistic formalisms as well as constraint programming languages use feature structures as a basic data structure. During processing, these structures can become quite large (up to thousands of nodes), which poses the problem of focusing on the relevant parts when inspecting them. FEGRAMED provides the user with a customized view of the feature structure, e.g. hiding and ordering features, imploding and exploding parts of the structure, searching for features or atoms, and more. Moreover, FEGRAMED provides a fully interactive editor for developing and maintaining feature structures. Among its editing capabilities are insertion, deletion, copy and paste of structures, features and atoms. Its simple application interface makes adaption easy, so that other systems can directly profit from FEGRAMEDs features. Integrating powerful viewing and manipulation functionality, it is a tool that is built to cope with the complexity of feature structures in constraint-based systems.