TreeForm is a cross-platform syntax tree drawing software written in Java. TreeForm has been freely available as an open-source project since February 2006.
In the spring of 2007, TreeForm was edited extensively and tested for suitability among a select group of linguists at UBC. A comparison of TreeForm along with other methods of drawing syntax trees, along with the cognitive walkthrough. I puglished the results with Daniel Archambault in Literary and Linguistic Computing as an article entitled TreeForm: Explaining and exploring grammar through syntax trees. The abstract is as follows:
Linguists studying grammar often describe their models using a syntax tree. Drawing a syntax tree involves the depiction of a rooted tree with additional syntactic features using specific domain conventions. TreeForm assists users in developing syntax trees, complete with movement lines, coreference, and feature association, in order to explore their syntactic theories and explain them to their colleagues. It is a drag-and-drop alternative to LaTeX and labelled bracket notation tools already available, which many linguists find difficult to use. We compare the output of TreeForm to those existing tools and show that it is able to better respect the conventions of the domain. We assess how easily linguists learn to use TreeForm through a series of cognitive walkthroughs. Our reviews find that TreeForm is a viable alternative to existing tools.
With TreeForm, you can create and reorder syntax trees with Unicode fonts, add features, case, associations and movement lines in black and white or color, and save the results for future editing or print to pdf for use in word processing or Latex documents. TreeForm itself has been used extensively by researchers worlwide.
A full size video demonstrating how TreeForm works may be downloaded here. Special thanks to all those who have helped make TreeForm a successful project, to my many users, and to the 37,000 who have tried TreeForm since I uploaded it to SorceForge.
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