Grammatical Framework

Abstract

Grammatical Framework (GF) is a special-purpose functional language for defining grammars. It uses a Logical Framework (LF) for a description of abstract syntax, and adds to this a notation for defining concrete syntax. GF grammars themselves are purely declarative, but can be used both for linearizing syntax trees and parsing strings. GF can describe both formal and natural languages. The key notion of this description is a grammatical object, which is not just a string, but a record that contains all information on inflection and inherent grammatical features such as number and gender in natural languages, or precedence in formal languages. Grammatical objects have a type system, which helps to eliminate run-time errors in language processing. In the same way as a LF, GF uses dependent types in abstract syntax to express semantic conditions, such as well-typedness and proof obligations. Multilingual grammars, where one abstract syntax has many parallel concrete syntaxes, can be used for reliable and meaning-preserving translation. They can also be used in authoring systems, where syntax trees are constructed in an interactive editor similar to proof editors based on LF. While being edited, the trees can simultaneously be viewed in different languages. This paper starts with a gradual introduction to GF, going through a sequence of simpler formalisms till the full power is reached. The introduction is followed by a systematic presentation of the GF formalism and outlines of the main algorithms: partial evaluation and parser generation. The paper concludes by brief discussions of the Haskell implementation of GF, existing applications, and related work.

Efficient verification of railway infrastructure designs against standard regulations

“…Writing text in a controlled natural language is a harder problem, as the formal grammar limits what can be expressed, and also how it is written. This problem can be mitigated by means of specialized text editors (e.g., as provided by the Grammatical Framework [44], [45,Chap. 7] or Attempto Controlled English [15,25]) which guide the user towards writing acceptable sentences.…”

Grammatical framework web service

“…Grammatical Framework (GF, Ranta, 2004) is a typetheoretical grammar formalism. A GF grammar consists of an abstract syntax, which defines a set of abstract syntax trees, and one or more concrete syntaxes, which define how abstract syntax trees are mapped to (and from) strings.…”

“…We present a web service for natural language processing with Portable Grammar Format (PGF, Angelov et al, 2008) grammars, which can be used to build interactive natural language web applications. PGF is the back-end format to which Grammatical Framework (GF, Ranta, 2004) grammars are compiled. PGF has been designed to allow efficient implementations.…”

Automatic test suite generation for PMCFG grammars

“…Our concrete implementation is for a particular grammar formalism, namely parallel multiple context-free grammars (pmcfg) (Seki et al, 1991), which is the core formalism used by the Grammatical Framework (gf) (Ranta, 2004). However, the general method works for any formalism that is at most as expressive as pmcfg: context-free grammars (cfg) and multiple context-free grammars (mcfg), which covers formalisms such as Tree-Adjoining Grammar (Joshi et al, 1975), Combinatorial Categorial Grammar (Steedman, 1988) and Minimalist Grammar (Stabler, 1997).…”

“…Grammatical Framework (gf) (Ranta, 2004) is a framework for building multilingual grammar applications. Its main components are a functional programming language for writing grammars and a resource library (Ranta, 2009), which, as of May 2018, contains the linguistic details of 40 natural languages.…”