Are FTFs dependent on ICECUP?
No. At present, people use FTFs with ICECUP because ICECUP is the main way in which we distribute the editor, and ICECUP is organised around the FTF concept. This does not mean that they could not be used in other treebank tools. (By the way, our main reason for not wishing to distribute the source code at present is practical: we are continually developing the approach and we want to keep versions standard and clear.) But if you have suggestions for collaboration, do email us. We have stood on the shoulders of others, most notably, Hans van Halteren and Theo van den Heuvel, and their LDB system (built originally for the Nijmegen Parsed Corpus). This program makes use of user-definable ‘patterns’ which are similar in concept to our FTFs, although they can require more effort and programming from the end user. Since the publication of ICECUP 3.0, a number of other query systems have been developed which replicate the basic idea of employing tree models.
