Interoperable Grammars

Abstract

For languages with significant inflectional morphology, development of a morpho-logical parser is often a prerequisite to fur-ther computational linguistic capabilities. We focus on two difficulties for this devel-opment: the short lifetime of software such as parsing engines, and the difficulty of porting grammars to new parsing engines. We describe a methodology we have de-veloped to promote portability, using a for-mal declarative grammar written in XML, which we supplement with a traditional de-scriptive grammar. The two grammars are combined into a single document using Literate Programming. The formal gram-mar is designed to be independent of a par-ticular parsing engine’s programming lan-guage, thus helping solve the software life-time and portability problems.