Introduction to Grammar Engineering

1
Introduction to Grammar Engineering

• The ParGram Project
• Jonas Kuhn

• Universität Potsdam, 2006

2
The ParGram project

• Started in 1994
• with (Xerox) PARC, California
• Xerox Grenoble, France and
• Institut für maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung,
  Stuttgart, Germany
• Parallel development of LFG grammars for
• English
• French
• German
• Japanese
• Norwegian
• Urdu

3
The ParGram project

• LFGs F-structure as a relatively
  language-independent level of syntactic
  representation
• ParGram Test LFG formalism for universality and
  coverage limitations
• Close collaboration between grammar writers and
  developers of XLEs parser/generator/ grammar
  development environment

4
Size of the grammars

5
Parallelism across grammars

• Close parallelism at level of f-structure (unless
  motivated by linguistically divergent structures)
• Divergence at c-structure is natural and expected

6
Justified differences

• Example
• 
  English
• 
  Japanese

7
Maintaining parallelism

• Semi-annual project meetings
• Feature committee sessions
• Prepare analyses for a number of parallel
  translated sample sentences
• Discuss divergences at f-structure
• Decide on justified specialities vs. required
  modifications of grammars
• Feature declaration section in grammars to
  enforce agreed-upon specifications
• Further consistency checking tools