Together with Cray Systems (Luxembourg), GSI-Erli was recently awarded a contract for the maintenance, distribution, and further development of ALEP, the Advanced Language Engineering Platform. A Unix-based, integrated development platform for writing linguistic software, ALEP is a kind of linguist’s equivalent of the Borland Integrated Development Environment (DE), much admired within the general software development community. As ALEP specialist Jörg Schültz of the IAI (Saarbr&�uml;cken, Germany) explains, ALEP serves as a useful intermediary between the linguist and the underl ying programming language. With ALEP, the linguist can continue to work with the lingui’ stic notation with which he or she is familiar, leaving system to handle procedural (ie, programming) chores. ALEP was originally developed at the behest of the European Commission by Belgian software house BIM.
    While the Commission may not be in a position to legislate use of ALEP within EU-funded projects, it is nonetheless taking steps to make the system attractive to potential users, which may of course include CEC funded R&TD groups. For one, it contracted Cray Systems to provide technical support, not an insignificant matter. For another, it is funding the development of ALEP, compliant linguistic data. Under the direction of Paul Schmidt of the IAI, the LRE project GRAM is compiling a suite of GRAMmatical descriptions of nine EU languages with the aim of providing a common platform for the ALEP user group. By highlighting the formal and computational strengths and weakness of the system, the LS, GRAM consortium hopes to provide useful feed, back to the ALEP’s developers. The resulting linguistic software, which will be extensively documented, will eventually be incorporated into the ALEP starter kit, together with a common rule’ coding manual. Linguistic materials produced within other projects now under way in the second round of the LRE proGRAM, including DELIS, DISCOURSE, MULTEXT, and LGR, are also likely to be made available in ALEP,compliant form in due time. The availability of such materials may one day provide compelling reasons to adopt ALEP.
    Because it is EU-funded, ALEP is freely available to the linguistic engineering community, although potential users will still need to licence the commercial Prolog system upon which it is based.

Cray Systems, Boulevard Joseph II, 11b, L-1840 Luxembourg; Tel: +352 2508 90/91, Fax: +352 2508 92, Email: alep-support@cray-systems.lu

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