RASP is a domain-independent, robust parsing system for English. For ease of installation, the system is distributed in the form of binaries for 3 widespread unix architectures (Intel-32bit and -64bit/Linux, and Sparc/Solaris), with source code for most of the modules. It is free for research purposes.
RASP was originally developed on a UK EPSRC-funded project. Since the end of that project it has continued to be extended and enhanced on an on-going basis.
An informal description of the RASP system is online, with examples of system output. The first public release of the system was in January 2002; the second release (RASPv2) is now available. To obtain it, go to the RASP licence and download page.
Note that the system does not currently run on MS Windows.
Spring 2007: if you are running on a Linux system based on the recently-released Fedora Core 6 and get the error message
then edit the file scripts/rasp.sh to replacetag/ix86_linux/label: error while loading shared libraries: libdb-4.2.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:$RASP/tag/database/${arch}
with
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:$RASP/tag/database/${arch}; export LD_LIBRARY_PATH
Autumn 2006: we hope to add binaries for PPC/OSX and Intel/OSX soon.
June 2006: second public release. If you are a current user of RASP we will be notifying you by email about the new release.
Summer 2004: if you are running the first release of RASP on a recently upgraded Linux system and see the following error message
then please download an updated version of the parser binaries (3.4MB). You should put them in the directory gde/ix86_linux/, replacing the previous versions.gde/ix86_linux/libacli612.so: symbol errno, version GLIBC_2.0 not defined in file libc.so.6 with link time reference"
January 2002: the first public release of the parsing toolkit is now available.
If you use RASP and publish any results derived from it, we ask that you refer to the following paper:
Briscoe, E., J. Carroll and R. Watson (2006) The Second Release of the RASP System. In Proceedings of the COLING/ACL 2006 Interactive Presentation Sessions, Sydney, Australia.
Briscoe, E. and J. Carroll (2006) Evaluating the accuracy of an unlexicalized statistical parser on the PARC DepBank. In Proceedings of the COLING/ACL 2006 Main Conference Poster Sessions, Sydney, Australia.
Watson, R., J. Carroll and E. Briscoe (2005) Efficient extraction of grammatical relations. In Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Parsing Technologies, Vancouver, Canada.
Further RASP-related references are available on the RASP project web page.