FGW is a system for the syntactic realization of sentences, using semantic structures as their input. These underlying structures are very similar in essence to those of Simon Dik’s Functional Grammar). The system uses dependence trees with feature structures as nodes as its representation structure and offers a variety of rule types (expression rules, morphological rules, linear precedence rules, among others) in order to incrementally transform the input dependence tree and arrange its nodes in order to produce a surface sentence.

FGW has been implemented in Visual Prolog, by Juan C. Ruiz-Antón (Department of Translation, Universitat Jaume I, Castelló, Spain), and runs on MS Windows 95/98. It can be run on Linux by means of the Wine emulator.

• Executable program (version 2.0, build 9)
• User's guide and reference manual
• Some sample grammars

The installation of FGW is quite simple:

1. Create a folder in your preferred location at the hard disk.
2. Extract the compressed file fgw2-0.zip there, by using WinZip or other uncompressing application.
3. Click on the executable file fgw2.0.exe with the right button of the mouse, and select the option Create shortcut. Move the resulting file to a location of your preference (for example to the desktop).

The typical mode of using FGW is to write a grammar and a lexicon for the language you are interested in. The procedure for doing this is explained at length in the User's Guide.

This version of FGW is accompanied with a pair of small grammar descriptions for Yidish and Uzbek. You may use these files in order to test FGW immediately, and also as a model for the grammar descriptions for your preferred language.

For a quick glance of what FGW does, load any of the grammar files included in the distribution package. Try for example Yidish. Use the option Load Grammar File in the File menu, and select the file yidish.grm. You must load the lexicon too (Load Lexicon in the File menu). Once you are ready to test it, open an input dialog window (by using the option Input clause in the Generator menu) and type the following predication into the window:

DECL Pres see A=(I) U=(d pl:child Poss=(d sg:woman))

This predication corresponds, in English, to the sentence 'I am seeing the children of the woman' (DECL: declarative illocution, Pres: Present tense, A: Actor, U: Undergoer, d: definite, pl: plural, Poss: Possessor, sg: singular)

Hit OK (or press the ENTER key). Then the following sentence (expressing this meaning in Yaqui) will appear in the message window:

ix ze der froys kinder.

You can find many more predications to try in the file yidish.txt in the distribution package.

FGW grammar and lexicon files are plain text files. You can open, edit and save them by using a standard text file, as Windows' NotePad. This is a very limited application, however. For better results, you can use one of the many free text editors that can be found in the Internet. A very good candidate is JGSoft's EditPad Lite.