So FoxType is just Spacy[0]? I honestly thought this might be something different until I checked out the Spacy page and saw FoxType listed as a customer. Kind of a dick move simply repackaging other people's work and passing. It off as your own. (Yes, this is literally just the "displacy" demo.)
Spacy is a pretty good system. It's fast, way faster thank NLTK and the Stanford stuff and it's pretty accurate. Also it's licensing is pretty flexible. The only knock I have against it is the lack of bindings for languages other than Python, but whatever.
There's more to their product it seems than just the front end for sentence diagramming. While a shout out wouldn't hurt, I don't think it's really a dick move.
There's also more to Spacy than just dependency parsing as well, but that's a big part of it.
I would certainly hope there's more to FoxLab, but I have literally seen this demo before.
I have also been around the block enough times to know that putting some ill fitting duct tape around a bunch of other libraries that do all the work to make a quick buck in a hot space is a very common trick as well.
Seems to fall for a lot of easy traps. Garden path sentences ("The old man the boats" or "The horse raced past the barn fell") are parsed wrong, and it parses the two sentences/phrases "When he did that I laughed" and "When he said that I laughed" identically - by interpreting "that" as a preposition in both cases, which it isn't.
It's cool that it parses on the fly. But unless it parses correctly I don't see how it actually serves a purpose other than just looking cool.
> I heard you like phrase structure, so I put a phrase in your phrase so you can parse a phrase while you parse a phrase.
It misinterpreted "like" as 'in the manner of; akin to' ("I heard you as though [I were hearing] phrase structure"?), so I tried
> I heard you enjoy phrase structure, so I put a phrase in your phrase so you can parse a phrase while you parse a phrase.
That got parsed correctly.
Edit: well, it says "enjoy" is a base form rather than 3rd person singular, which is wrong in this context; it's an inflected form, like "I heard she enjoys phrase structure".
These require a system which either backtracks or recognizes it's made a mistake and corrects it. I know how to do that with a rule-based parser.
It also fails on "British left waffles on Falklands." While there are two syntactic parsers for that, one of them borders on the absurd and should be rejected. The problem is that to parse some sentences requires understanding of the words and phrases it reads, which in turn requires common sense.
Well, that is just choosing the semantically correct parse from multiple syntactically correct parses. This parser isn't even finding syntactically correct parses.
I don't see how it got it wrong (and it would be surprising if it did given the sentence is not syntactically ambiguous). It does use a visual notation which, AFAIK, differs from the standard in linguistcs [0].
This site is producing dependency parses, which have become popular in the last 10 years or so. The linked figure is a phrase structure parse, which used to be the thing everyone worked on but have since turned out to be both harder to get and less useful than dependency parses.
Spacy is a pretty good system. It's fast, way faster thank NLTK and the Stanford stuff and it's pretty accurate. Also it's licensing is pretty flexible. The only knock I have against it is the lack of bindings for languages other than Python, but whatever.
[0] https://spacy.io/