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Context-free Grammar Sentence Generator

Susanna Cumming

“Generator” is a random sentence generator in the form of an Excel 97/2000 workbook. It is written in Visual Basic for Applications. It takes as input a context-free grammar which you can specify in the worksheet, and outputs a random sentence generated by the grammar (Row 3 in the screenshot).

You can control the output to some degree: rules can be marked to cause them to fire.

A “trace” is also generated, showing which rules fired and how the output string was built up.

See the “help” worksheet in the workbook for more instructions.

Naturally, you will have to enable macros in Excel to use the generator.