Generating LFGs with a MetaGrammar

Lionel Clement and Alexandra Kinyon

Abstract

Proceedings of LFG03; CSLI Publications On-line

In this paper, we build up on the work presented in (Clement & Kinyon 03), and (Kinyon and Rambow03): we present the notion of MetaGrammar, which was originally successfully used to ease the development and maintenance of large Tree-Adjoining Grammars. We explain how we reuse the notion of MetaGrammar in order to generate LFGs. The main idea is that a compact MetaGrammar hierarchy is hand-crafted, from which large grammars are automatically generated offline. We argue that MetaGrammar hierarchies should abstract as much as possible from any given syntactic framework and machinery, and be closer to ``descriptive linguistics" in order to facilitate porting hierarchies from one framework to another. We also discuss work in progress such as generating grammars for different languages and frameworks from a single MetaGrammar hierarchy.