An Introduction to the Grammatical Framework.

Abstract:
According to one view, we can get computers to process human language by providing a grammar: a set of rules for analysing and producing text and speech. The Grammatical Framework GF is essentially a programming language for writing such grammars which lowers the intrinsically high cost of grammar development by employing features that have proven useful in software engineering such as a static type system, a module system, libraries, compilers. The system follows the model of typed functional programming languages like Haskell and ML.

GF has adopted another well-known principle from computer science to handle multilinguality: the distinction between concrete and abstract syntax which is manifest at two different levels of grammar. The underlying language-independent functionality of the grammar is captured at the abstract level, whilst the language-specific variation is at the concrete level. Provided the underlying meanings are within the scope of the abstract level, GF is ideal for the development of machine translation across different natural languages.

Translation is one of a number of NL-processing tasks that is handled by means of semantic actions associated with syntactic nodes. Other tasks, such as question-answering and dialogue systems can also be handled using semantic actions whose complexity is managed using libraries known as resource grammars.

In this talk I will attempt to illustrate the concepts mentioned above with examples.

Reference

A. Ranta, Grammatical Framework, Programming with Multilingual Grammars, Stanford: CSLI Publications, 2011

Website

http://www.grammaticalframework.org