GRASP is a dependency parser for identification of grammatical relations in child language transcripts in the CHILDES Database. It was created by Kenji Sagae and the current version of GRASP is called MEGRASP. In November 2007, we used MEGRASP to tag the grammatical relations for all of the corpora in the Eng-USA and Eng-UK segments of the CHILDES database. These tags are on the %xsyn line. To understand these tags, you should read the description of the grammatical relations used by MEGRASP which is available here.

For an overview of morphosyntactic processing through MOR, POST, POSTTRAIN, and GRASP, please read this recent summary.

The new %xsyn line can also be used for automatic computation of IPSyn. For information on this, please read this paper:
Sagae, K., Lavie, A., & MacWhinney, B. (2005). Automatic measurement of syntactic development in child language. ACL Proceedings.

You may also be interested in running MEGRASP on your own data sets. Currently, these versions of MEGRASP v0.7 (released June 15, 2007) are available:

• CygWin
• Linux
• Mac OSX
• Windows
• Source
  

After downloading and unzipping the archive for your platform, please look at the README file (README.txt in the Windows distribution) for instructions on running the parser. Please feel free to contact sagae+megrasp@cs.cmu.edu with questions, comments, requests and bug reports.

For more detail on GRASP, please read this paper:
Sagae, K., Davis, E., Lavie, A., MacWhinney, B. and Wintner, S. (2007). High-accuracy annotation and parsing of CHILDES transcripts. Proceedings of the ACL-2007 Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Acquisition. Prague, Czech Republic.