GF 25 years today

[Aarne Ranta]

Good morning gf-dev,

Today is the 25th birthday of GF, in the sense that the first public presentation of GF was given on 20 March 1998 in a workshop at INRIA Nancy. The slides of that presentation are available in

https://github.com/GrammaticalFramework/gf-core/blob/master/doc/nancy-slides.pdf

and you can even find the source code, in

https://github.com/GrammaticalFramework/gf-core/blob/master/doc/GF-0.1.tgz

To compile the source, you will need to run the HBC Haskell compiler in "non-pedantic" mode

https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=58df34dc98c03950696486ca7ee1df98864bc515

which means that it is probably easier just to read the code, if you are interested.

A lot has happened in GF in the 25 years that have passed. I would like to thank you all for your contributions, which have made GF to what it is now!

Regards

  Aarne

 

[Inari]

Thank you Aarne for starting it all! I have been part of the community for the latter half of these 25 years, and I've been extremely lucky to have made GF into my career. I took my first GF class as a student in 2010 in Helsinki, and now I'm writing this email in 2023 in Singapore, where my job is to write GF at the SMU Centre for Computational Law.

I hope that we are still going strong 25 years from now! 

Inari

P.S. If anyone is considering something extra nice to celebrate the anniversary, the summer school in August is a great change to meet the GF crowd IRL! https://school.grammaticalframework.org/2023/

[Michal Měchura]

Wow, GF is a young adult now!

So maybe this is a chance for me to say thank you for inventing it, Aarne! Even though I’ve never actually made anything with GF, it has – since I first came across GF back in 2010 – always been an inspiring source of ideas on how to model syntax and morphology, how to organise the relationship between syntax and semantics, and how to think about language. In this AI-obsessed age GF is a refreshing alternative.

Also, the fact that people around GF are so friendly and approachable is a strong plus. I haven’t been getting myself involved in the GF community much lately but I do hope to make it to the summer school this year.

Michal

[John J. Camilleri]

Wow, Happy Birthday GF!

I've been part of the community since 2009 and it's fair to say that GF has played a major role in my career and life! Maybe GF has not become the widespread technology I once dreamed it would, and may become even more niche now that these LLMs have become so good and accessible. Still, it is quite a special niche and I have never been able to shake lose from the GF community 😊

John

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[Roussanka Loukanova]

Happy Birthday GF from me, with my best wishes for ever greater successes!

There is a great chapter by Aarne to celebrate 25 Years GF:

R. Loukanova, P.L. Lumsdaine, R. Muskens (Editors). 

Logic and Al- gorithms in Computational Linguistics 2021 (LACompLing2021). 

Part of the book series Studies in Computational Intelligence (SCI, volume 1081). 

DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21780-7

Publisher: Springer Cham.

Best Regards,

Roussanka

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[Aarne Ranta]

Inari,

Thanks for your wishes! Your contributions to GF have been immense, and they are still growing!

  Aarne

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[Aarne Ranta]

Michal,

It must be the understatement of the year, that you "never made anything" with GF! You have done lots of new things that have inspired many of us to think in new ways.

Hope to see you in the summer school again! And maybe also at plevna.fi ...

 

  Aarne 

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[Aarne Ranta]

John,

Thanks! You are truly a full-stack GF developer, and have produced many of the things that make our niche useful.

  Aarne

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[Aarne Ranta]

Roussanka,

Thanks a lot for the wishes! And also for your wonderful support in the long process leading to the publishing of the article that you link to.

  Aarne

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[Michal Měchura]

Hope to see you in the summer school again! And maybe also at plevna.fi …

Ah, now you’re talking! :-)
M.

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[Jordi Saludes]

Happy anniversary!

I remember my first contact with GF: We were in a EU project about teaching mathematics on the web and were having to deal with multilingual delivery of math exercises. Lauri Carlson (who, if memory serves, was in the following years Innari’s masters advisor) told us he knew about a guy who could help us with that.

A meeting was held later on in Helsinki with Aarne and there I remember falling in love with the concept at first sight!

Per molts anys!

El 20 març 2023, a les 9:26, Aarne Ranta <aarne...@gmail.com> va escriure:



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[Peter Ljunglöf]

Wow, that's 1/4 of a century...
But I actually thought that it was much older - when I started as a PhD student 1999 it was already quite mature!

I haven't been very active with GF the last years, but it has been a substantial part of my academic life, especially my first 10 years or so:)

best,
Peter

PS. Both me and Aarne will probrably be retired in another 25 years, but hopefully not GF...

[Christina Unger]

Happy birthday, GF!

And congratulations, Aarne. It's a great achievement to build a
technology that is still alive and kicking after 25 years. And maybe
an even greater achievement to build a community around it that is so
friendly and engaging as this one.

I'm very happy to have been a small part of the GF journey; it's
connected with very fond memories. :)

Best wishes,
Christina

P.S. So do I understand it correctly that GF will have a birthday
party in Plevna, Tampere? ;)

[Aarne Ranta]

Jordi,

Thanks a lot! Those EU projects, starting with WebALT around 2006, were an important milestone in scaling up GF to real world applications. Your contributions were substantial, both in the mathematical language libraries and in the Catalan resource grammar. Not to forget the organization of the summer school in Barcelona, and several other memorable meetings there.

Regards

  Aarne

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[Aarne Ranta]

Peter,

You are probably the second-oldest member of the community still working on GF. It is true that GF was not built from scratch in 1998, but was built on prior work on type theory and grammar, focused on generation (linearization). The biggest novelty was a declarative grammar formalism from which both generation and parsing were derived automatically. But at the time, and still until 2004, the parser generation was a naive brute-force algorithm. Your thesis work changed it completely, and in my mind, GF reached maturity at the time when you showed its equivalence to PMCFG. 

Thanks for also being active afterwards, for instance in supervising Herbert and David to do new cool things with GF!

  Aarne

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[Aarne Ranta]

Christina,

Thanks a lot! Your contributions have been very influential in finding new ways to use GF, and you have also contributed to commercial projects such as the GDPR lexicon and cooking chatbots.

Having a birthday party in Plevna during the summer school is a great idea! We can probably find some sponsoring for it. I hope you will be able to attend!

  Aarne

 

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[Hans Leiss]

Congratulations, to GF's inventor and developers!

As you know, Aarne, I always admired your design of the GF-language, the high quality of its implementation by Krasimir and Thomas (mainly, to my impression, also Inari now), and the enormous amount of linguistic details of so many different languages in the GF resource libraries.

I hope the GF system stays around for another 25 years to stimulate research in the structure of languages with modern tools, and I hope the GF community keeps as friendly and attractive to young able researchers (and old guys like me) as it used to be.

Best wishes,
Hans

[Aarne Ranta]

Hans, thanks for your persistent and inspiring work in stretching GF to its limits and not being satisfied with half-baked solutions and explanations! Your work on Ancient Greek and German has addressed some of the most difficult problems I have seen in GF, and your rigorous approach to formal language theory is an ideal that is not always easy to match. You have also done a great job in helping new people to become productive contributors to the GF project, and I hope we will meet in many summer schools to come, as well as on other occasions!

With best regards

  Aarne 

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