Version 4.8.5 of the Link Grammar Parser is now available. 

This is the third release in about a week; each prompted by a
build-break in the previous version.  Sorry!  There's been assorted
(minor) new work, and this has been enough to cause trouble for
various people.

Some notable changes in the last 6 weeks:
 * Improved Russian (UTF-8) support for MSWindows users.
 * Build files for MSVC12
 * Several Java binding fixes
 * English dictionary: add a verb-wall connector for present participles.

A full list of changes is given below. If none of these seem to affect
you, there is no particular need to upgrade.

--------------------

The link-grammar homepage:
http://www.abiword.org/projects/link-grammar/

Download:
http://www.abiword.org/downloads/link-grammar/4.7.9/link-grammar-4.7.9.tar.gz

WHAT IS LINK GRAMMAR?
The Link Grammar Parser is a syntactic parser of English (and other
languages as well), based on link grammar, an original theory of English
syntax.  Given a sentence, the system assigns to it a syntactic
structure, which consists of a set of labelled links connecting pairs of
words. The parser also produces a "constituent" (Penn tree-bank style
phrase tree) representation of a sentence (showing noun phrases, verb
phrases, etc.). The RelEx extension provides dependency-parse output.


CHANGELOG:

Version 4.8.5 (5 January 2014)
 * Update memory usage accounting; fix accounting bugs.
 * Fix Java garbage collection bug.
 * Fix numerous compiler warnings in the SAT-solver code.
 * Fix build-break involving multiple declaration of 'Boolean'.

Version 4.8.4 (30 December 2013)
 * Fix build break for Mac OSX.

Version 4.8.3 (30 December 2013)
 * Create new msvc12 build files, restore old msvc9 files.
 * Revert location of the Windows mbrtowc declaration.
 * Add verb-wall connector for present participles.
 * Fix build-time include file directory paths.
 * Provide the 'any' language to enumerate all possible linkages.
 * Fix recognition of U+00A0, c2 a0, NO-BREAK SPACE as whitespace.
 * Improve parse-time performance of exceptionally long sentences.
 * Fix crash on certain sentences containing equals sign.

Version 4.8.2 (25 November 2013)
 * More MSWindows UTF-8/multi-byte fixes (for Russian).
 * Add missing JSONUtils file.

Version 4.8.1 (21 November 2013)
 * Ongoing work on viterbi.
 * Updated MSVC9 project files from Jand Hashemi (Lucky--)
 * Fix important bug in Java services: return top parses, not random ones.
 * Java: for the link-diagram string, do not limit to 80 char term width.
 * Windows: UTF-8 fixes so that Russian works in most MSWindows locales.


=================================================================
Version 4.8.0 of the Link Grammar Parser is now available. 

This is the start of a new version series, containing an important
change to the English language dictionary. Three new link types are
introduced WV, CV and IV. These are used to connect the left-wall to
the primary verb of the sentence (WV), to connect the ruling clause
to the primary verb of a dependent clause (CV), and a similar link
for certain infinitive verbs (IV).  The goal of these links is to
make it easier to locate verbs, and thus to provide a more direct
mapping from the link-grammar formalism to a dependency parse (as
dependency parses always put the verb at the root of a sentence).

These are not the first links that explicitly indicate root verbs:
several other link types already play this role: The AF, CP, Eq, COq
and B links already play this role. The new WV, CV and IV links
round out this capability and do so in a very general form.  See
http://www.abisource.com/projects/link-grammar/dict/section-WV.html
for details.

With this release, we expect that all (non-auxiliary) verbs in a
sentence will be linked either to the wall, or to a controlling parent.
We also expect there to be some additional fixes and tightening-up
to occur in future releases, especially in regards to comparative 
sentences.

This release also includes a variety of fixes to the Java API/server.
In addition, some ancient, deprecated C code was removed.

--------------------

The link-grammar homepage:
http://www.abiword.org/projects/link-grammar/

Download:
http://www.abiword.org/downloads/link-grammar/4.7.9/link-grammar-4.7.9.tar.gz

WHAT IS LINK GRAMMAR?
The Link Grammar Parser is a syntactic parser of English (and other
languages as well), based on link grammar, an original theory of English
syntax.  Given a sentence, the system assigns to it a syntactic
structure, which consists of a set of labelled links connecting pairs of
words. The parser also produces a "constituent" (Penn tree-bank style
phrase tree) representation of a sentence (showing noun phrases, verb
phrases, etc.). The RelEx extension provides dependency-parse output.


CHANGELOG:

Version 4.8.0 (24 October 2013)
 * Fix "he answered yes"
 * Support bulleted, numbered lists.
 * New link types from Lian Ruiting, for identifying the head-verb.
 * Java: fix bug when totaling WordNet word-sense score.
 * Java: add info to README about using the JSON parse server.
 * Java: remove many deprecated functions.
 * C API: remove some deprecated functions.
 * Java: fix silent failure when library is not found.
 * Java: Add support for fetching the ASCII-art diagram string.
 * Java: Fix insane language selection initialization.
 * Fix: "The pig runs SLOWER than the cat."
 * Fix: conjoined superlatives: "... the longest and the farthest."
 * Fix: "inside" can be used with conjunction: "near or inside..."
 * Fix: conjoined question modifiers: "exactly when and precisely where..."
 * Fix: issue 59: crash/corruption when dictionary opened twice.
 * Fix: assorted exclamations!

