Grammatical Framework: Programming with Multilingual Grammars

Aarne Ranta

This is the web page of the book

Aarne Ranta, Grammatical Framework: Programming with Multilingual Grammars, CSLI Publications, Stanford, 2011, 340 pp, ISBN-10: 1-57586-626-9 (Paper), 1-57586-627-7 (Cloth).

Publisher's information

Publisher's web page (look for "Series" -> "CSLI Studies in Computational Linguistics")

http://www-csli.stanford.edu/pubs/

Order

Direct order ($32.50 paperback, $70 hardcover):

http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/G/bo12469871.html

Amazon order USA ($32.50 paperback, $70 hardcover):

http://www.amazon.com/Grammatical-Framework-Programming-Multilingual-Information/dp/1575866269/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1308585697&sr=8-2

Amazon order UK (£21 paperback, £45 hardcover):

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Grammatical-Framework-Programming-Multilingual-Computational/dp/1575866269/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1315580083&sr=8-6

Book description

Grammars of natural languages are complex systems, and their computer implementation requires both programming skills and linguistic knowledge, especially when dealing with other languages than English. This book makes such tasks accessible for a wide range of programmers. It introduces GF (Grammatical Framework), which is a programming language designed for writing grammars, which may moreover address several languages in parallel. The book shows how to write grammars in GF and use them in applications such as tourist phrasebooks, spoken dialogue systems, and natural language interfaces. The examples and exercises address several languages, and the readers are guided to look at their own languages from the computational perspective.

With an emphasis on good engineering, the book promotes modularity and division of labour - in particular, the use of libraries. It introduces the GF Resource Grammar Library, which currently addresses 16 languages. This number is constantly growing due to contributions from the international GF community. The library makes it painless to build applications and to port them to new languages. The book introduces a wide range of such applications, which run on platforms ranging from web servers to mobile phones. But the book also gives guidance for those readers who want to understand the underlying linguistics and implement resource grammars for new languages.

The book starts with a hands-on tutorial, continues with a selection of advanced topics, and ends with a complete reference manual of GF. Requiring very little background knowledge, it is accessible for second-year students that have experience with computers and an interest for languages. At the same time, its novel and advanced material makes it interesting for senior researchers in computer science, linguistics, and related fields.

How to cite

  @Book{ranta-2011,
    author = {Aarne Ranta},
    title =  {{Grammatical Framework:
               Programming with Multilingual Grammars}},
    publisher = {{CSLI Publications}},
    year = {2011},
    address = "Stanford",
    note = "ISBN-10: 1-57586-626-9 (Paper), 1-57586-627-7 (Cloth)"
  }

Detailed Table of Contents

Supporting material

Slides for teaching the book chapter by chapter.

Code examples. You can also download the complete example set as a compressed tar file, gf-book-examples.tgz.

GF Web IDE: build grammars in the cloud, without installing GF.

Demos

on-line translator (Section 7.12)
syntax editor (Section 7.13)
multimodal dialogue system (Section 7.15)