Language Engineering in Grammatial Framework (GF)

Doctoral thesis, 2006

The basis for the work presented is Grammatical Framework (GF)—a grammar formalism based on type theory. It is also a powerful language processor that provides a convenient framework for various multilingual applications. The primary concern of this thesis is the usage of GF as a piece of software. The main results are: • Implementing a syntax editor, which provides a graphical user interface (GUI) for the command-line GF core. • Writing the Russian resource grammar that takes care of the most basic morphological and syntactic rules and serves as a standard library for building application grammars (describing sublanguage domains) in Russian. These results contribute to language engineering in GF on two different levels: • Author level (end-user)—constructing documents in natural languages. • Grammarian level — building a grammar description, which is later used on the author level. One can also distinguish between application and resource grammars. An application grammar focuses of a particular sub-language domain, while resource grammar is a general-purpose grammar that forms a basis for application grammars.