The PERPL Compiler

PERPL stands for Probabilistic Exact Recursive Programming Language. Unlike many general-purpose PPLs, PERPL performs exact inference, via factor graph grammars. And unlike other PPLs that do support exact inference, PERPL can express unbounded recursive calls and (with some restrictions) recursive data structures. For example, a PCFG parser written in PERPL appears to generate (infinitely many) trees and sum the probabilities of those (exponentially many) trees that yield a given string; yet it compiles to a cubic-sized system of equations whose solution is equivalent to the CKY algorithm.

For more information:

• Installation: install.md
• Tutorial: tutorial.md
• Language reference: language.md

Building the compiler

For more detailed instructions, please see install.md.

To build the compiler (requires GHC):

make

To run tests:

make tests

Using the compiler

To compile a PERPL program:

./perplc [options] FILE.ppl

Options:

-O0 -O1     Optimization level (0 = off, 1 = on)
-l          Don't linearize the file (implies -c -e)
-e          Don't eliminate recursive datatypes (implies -c)
-d DTYPES   Defunctionalize recursive datatypes DTYPES
-r DTYPES   Refunctionalize recursive datatypes DTYPES
-c          Compile only to PPL code (not to FGG)
-z          Compute sum-product
-o OUTFILE  Output an FGG to OUTFILE

Although perplc can compute sum-products, its implementation is not very efficient. The normal usage is to use the -o option to output an FGG to a JSON file. Then the FGG can be processed using the fggs package.

Credits

This code is written by Colin McDonald (University of Notre Dame) with contributions from David Chiang (University of Notre Dame) and Chung-chieh Shan (Indiana University) and is licensed under the MIT License. It is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Award Nos. CCF-2019266 and CCF-2019291.