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+GF Resource Grammar Summer School
+Gothenburg, 17-28 August 2009
+Aarne Ranta (aarne at chalmers.se)
+
+%!Encoding : iso-8859-1
+
+%!target:html
+%!postproc(html): #BECE <center>
+%!postproc(html): #ENCE </center>
+%!postproc(html): #GRAY <font color="green" size="-1">
+%!postproc(html): #EGRAY </font>
+%!postproc(html): #RED <font color="red">
+%!postproc(html): #YELLOW <font color="orange">
+%!postproc(html): #ERED </font>
+
+#BECE
+[school-langs.png]
+#ENCE
+
+
+//red=wanted, green=exists, orange=in-progress, solid=official-eu, dotted=non-eu//
+
+
+==News==
+
+An on-line course //GF for Resource Grammar Writers// will start on
+Monday 20 April at 15.30 CEST. The slides and recordings of the five
+45-minute lectures will be made available via this web page. If requested,
+the course may be repeated in the beginning of the summer school.
+
+
+==Executive summary==
+
+GF Resource Grammar Library is an open-source computational grammar resource
+that currently covers 12 languages.
+The Summer School is a part of a collaborative effort to extend the library 
+to all of the 23 official EU languages. Also other languages
+chosen by the participants are welcome.
+
+The missing EU languages are: 
+Czech, Dutch, Estonian, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Latvian, Lithuanian,
+Maltese, Portuguese, Slovak, and Slovenian. There is also more work to
+be done on Polish and Romanian.
+
+The linguistic coverage of the library includes the inflectional morphology
+and basic syntax of each language. It can be used in GF applications
+and also ported to other formats. It can also be used for building other
+linguistic resources, such as morphological lexica and parsers.
+The library is licensed under LGPL.
+
+In the summer school, each language will be implemented by one or two students 
+working together. A morphology implementation will be credited
+as a Chalmers course worth 7.5 ETCS points; adding a syntax implementation 
+will be worth more. The estimated total work load is 1-2 months for the
+morphology, and 3-6 months for the whole grammar.
+
+Participation in the course is free. Registration is done via the courses's
+Google group, [``groups.google.com/group/gf-resource-school-2009/`` http://groups.google.com/group/gf-resource-school-2009/]. The registration deadline is 15 June 2009.
+
+Some travel grants will be available. They are distributed on the basis of a
+GF programming contest in April and May.
+
+The summer school will be held on 17-28 August 2009, at the campus of 
+Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden.
+
+
+[align6.png]
+
+//Word alignment produced by GF from the resource grammar in Bulgarian, English, Italian, German, Finnish, French, and Swedish.//
+
+==Introduction==
+
+Since 2007, EU-27 has 23 official languages, listed in the diagram on top of this
+document. There is a growing need of linguistic resources for these 
+languages, to help in tasks such as translation and information retrieval. 
+These resources should be **portable** and **freely accessible**.
+Languages marked in red in the diagram are of particular interest for 
+the summer school, since they are those on which the effort will be concentrated.
+
+GF (Grammatical Framework, 
+[``digitalgrammars.com/gf`` http://digitalgrammars.com/gf])
+is a **functional programming language** designed for writing natural
+language grammars. It provides an efficient platform for this task, due to
+its modern characteristics:
+- It is a functional programming language, similar to Haskell and ML.
+- It has a static type system and type checker.
+- It has a powerful module system supporting separate compilation 
+  and data abstraction.
+- It has an optimizing compiler to **Portable Grammar Format** (PGF).
+- PGF can be further compiled to other formats, such as JavaScript and
+  speech recognition language models.
+- GF has a **resource grammar library** giving access to the morphology and
+  basic syntax of 12 languages.
+
+
+In addition to "ordinary" grammars for single languages, GF
+supports **multilingual grammars**. A multilingual GF grammar consists of an 
+**abstract syntax** and a set of **concrete syntaxes**. 
+An abstract syntax is system of **trees**, serving as a semantic
+model or an ontology. A concrete syntax is a mapping from abstract syntax 
+trees to strings of a particular language.
+
+These mappings defined in concrete syntax are **reversible**: they
+can be used both for **generating** strings from trees, and for
+**parsing** strings into trees. Combinations of generation and
+parsing can be used for **translation**, where the abstract
+syntax works as an **interlingua**. Thus GF has been used as a
+framework for building translation systems in several areas
+of application and large sets of languages.
+
+
+
+==The GF resource grammar library==
+
+The GF resource grammar library is a set of grammars usable as libraries when
+building translation systems and other applications. 
+The library currently covers
+the 9 languages coloured in green in the diagram above; in addition, 
+Catalan, Norwegian, and Russian are covered, and there is ongoing work on
+Arabic, Hindi/Urdu, Polish, Romanian, and Thai.
+
+The purpose of the resource grammar library is to define the "low-level" structure
+of a language: inflection, word order, agreement. This structure belongs to what
+linguists call morphology and syntax. It can be very complex and requires
+a lot of knowledge. Yet, when translating from one language to 
+another, knowing morphology and syntax is but a part of what is needed. 
+The translator (whether human
+or machine) must understand the meaning of what is translated, and must also know
+the idiomatic way to express the meaning in the target language. This knowledge
+can be very domain-dependent and requires in general an expert in the field to
+reach high quality: a mathematician in the field of mathematics, a meteorologist
+in the field of weather reports, etc.
+
+The problem is to find a person who is an expert in both the domain of translation
+and in the low-level linguistic details. It is the rareness of this combination
+that has made it difficult to build interlingua-based translation systems.
+The GF resource grammar library has the mission of helping in this task. 
+It encapsulates the low-level linguistics in program modules 
+accessed through easy-to-use interfaces.
+Experts on different domains can build translation systems by using the library, 
+without knowing low-level linguistics. The idea is much the same as when a 
+programmer builds a graphical user interface (GUI) from high-level elements such as
+buttons and menus, without having to care about pixels or geometrical forms.
+
+
+===Missing EU languages, by the family===
+
+Writing a grammar for a language is usually easier if other languages
+from the same family already have grammars. The colours have the same
+meaning as in the diagram above.
+
+Baltic:
+#RED Latvian #ERED
+#RED Lithuanian #ERED
+
+Celtic: 
+#RED Irish #ERED
+
+Fenno-Ugric: 
+#RED Estonian #ERED 
+#GRAY Finnish #EGRAY 
+#RED Hungarian #ERED
+
+Germanic: 
+#GRAY Danish #EGRAY
+#RED Dutch #ERED
+#GRAY English #EGRAY
+#GRAY German #EGRAY
+#GRAY Swedish #EGRAY
+
+Hellenic:
+#RED Greek #ERED
+
+Romance:
+#GRAY French #EGRAY
+#GRAY Italian #EGRAY
+#RED Portuguese #ERED
+#YELLOW Romanian #ERED
+#GRAY Spanish #EGRAY
+
+Semitic:
+#RED Maltese #ERED
+
+Slavonic:
+#GRAY Bulgarian #EGRAY
+#RED Czech #ERED
+#YELLOW Polish #ERED
+#RED Slovak #ERED
+#RED Slovenian #ERED
+
+
+
+
+
+
+===Applications of the library===
+
+In addition to translation, the library is also useful in **localization**,
+that is, porting a piece of software to new languages. 
+The GF resource grammar library has been used in three major projects that need
+interlingua-based translation or localization of systems to new languages:
+- in KeY, 
+  [``http://www.key-project.org/`` http://www.key-project.org/],
+  for writing formal and informal software specifications (3 languages)
+- in WebALT,
+  [``http://webalt.math.helsinki.fi/content/index_eng.html`` http://webalt.math.helsinki.fi/content/index_eng.html],
+  for translating mathematical exercises to 7 languages
+- in TALK [``http://www.talk-project.org`` http://www.talk-project.org],
+  where the library was used for localizing spoken dialogue systems 
+  to six languages
+
+
+The library is also a generic **linguistic resource**, 
+which can be used for tasks
+such as language teaching and information retrieval. The liberal license (LGPL)
+makes it usable for anyone and for any task. GF also has tools supporting the
+use of grammars in programs written in other 
+programming languages: C, C++, Haskell,
+Java, JavaScript, and Prolog. In connection with the TALK project, 
+support has also been
+developed for translating GF grammars to language models used in speech
+recognition (GSL/Nuance, HTK/ATK, SRGS, JSGF).
+
+
+
+===The structure of the library===
+
+The library has the following main parts:
+- **Inflection paradigms**, covering the inflection of each language.
+- **Core Syntax**, covering a large set of syntax rule that
+  can be implemented for all languages involved.
+- **Common Test Lexicon**, giving ca. 500 common words that can be used for
+  testing the library.
+- **Language-Specific Syntax Extensions**, covering syntax rules that are
+  not implementable for all languages.
+- **Language-Specific Lexica**, word lists for each language, with
+  accurate morphological and syntactic information.
+
+
+The goal of the summer school is to implement, for each language, at least
+the first three components. The latter three are more open-ended in character.
+
+
+==The summer school==
+
+The goal of the summer school is to extend the GF resource grammar library
+to covering all 23 EU languages, which means we need 15 new languages.
+We also welcome other languages than these 23, 
+if there are interested participants.
+
+The amount of work and skill is between a Master's thesis and a PhD thesis.
+The Russian implementation was made by Janna Khegai as a part of her
+PhD thesis; the thesis contains other material, too.
+The Arabic implementation was started by Ali El Dada in his Master's thesis,
+but the thesis does not cover the whole API. The realistic amount of work is
+somewhere between 3 and 8 person months, 
+but this is very much language-dependent.
+Dutch, for instance, can profit from previous implementations of German and
+Scandinavian languages, and will probably require less work.
+Latvian and Lithuanian are the first languages of the Baltic family and
+will probably require more work.
+
+In any case, the proposed allocation of work power is 2 participants per
+language. They will do 1 months' worth of home work, followed
+by 2 weeks of summer school, followed by 4 months work at home. 
+Who are these participants?
+
+
+===Selecting participants===
+
+Persons interested to participate in the Summer School should sign up in
+the **Google Group** of the course,
+
+[``groups.google.com/group/gf-resource-school-2009/`` http://groups.google.com/group/gf-resource-school-2009/]
+
+The registration deadline is 15 June 2009. 
+
+Notice: you can sign up in the Google 
+group even if you are not planning to attend the summer school, but are
+just interested in the topic. There will be a separate registration to the
+school itself later.
+
+The participants are recommended to learn GF in advance, by self-study from the 
+[tutorial http://digitalgrammars.com/gf/doc/gf-tutorial.html]. 
+This should take a couple of weeks. An **on-line course** will be
+arranged on 20-29 April to help in getting started with GF.
+
+At the end of the on-line course, a **programming assignment** will be published.
+This assignment will test skills required in resource grammar programming.
+Work on the assignment will take a couple of weeks.
+Those who are interested in getting a travel grant will submit
+their sample resource grammar fragment 
+to the Summer School Committee by 12 May.
+The Committee then decides who is given a travel grant of up to 1000 EUR.
+
+Notice: you can participate in the summer school without following the on-line
+course or participating in the contest. These things are required only if you
+want a travel grant. If requested by enough many participants, the lectures of
+the on-line course will be repeated in the beginning of the summer school.
+
+The summer school itself is devoted for working on resource grammars.
+In addition to grammar writing itself, testing and evaluation is
+performed. One way to do this is via adding new languages 
+to resource grammar applications - in particular, to the WebALT mathematical
+exercise translator.
+
+The resource grammars are expected to be completed by December 2009. They will 
+be published at GF website and licensed under LGPL.
+
+The participants are encouraged to contact each other and even work in groups.
+
+
+
+===Who is qualified===
+
+Writing a resource grammar implementation requires good general programming
+skills, and a good explicit knowledge of the grammar of the target language. 
+A typical participant could be 
+- native or fluent speaker of the target language
+- interested in languages on the theoretical level, and preferably familiar
+  with many languages (to be able to think about them on an abstract level)
+- familiar with functional programming languages such as ML or Haskell
+  (GF itself is a language similar to these)
+- on Master's or PhD level in linguistics, computer science, or mathematics
+
+
+But it is the quality of the assignment that is assessed, not any formal
+requirements. The "typical participant" was described to give an idea of
+who is likely to succeed in this.
+
+
+===Costs===
+
+The summer school is free of charge. 
+
+Some travel grants are given, on the basis of a programming contest, 
+to cover travel and accommodation costs up to 1000 EUR
+per person.
+
+The number of grants will be decided during Spring 2009, and the grand
+holders will be notified before the beginning of June.
+
+Special terms will apply to students in
+[GSLT http://www.gslt.hum.gu.se/] and
+[NGSLT http://ngslt.org/].
+
+
+
+
+
+===Teachers===
+
+A list of teachers will be published here later. Some of the local teachers 
+probably involved are the following:
+- Krasimir Angelov
+- Robin Cooper
+- Håkan Burden
+- Markus Forsberg
+- Harald Hammarström
+- Peter Ljunglöf
+- Aarne Ranta
+
+
+More teachers are welcome! If you are interested, please contact us so that
+we can discuss your involvement and travel arrangements.
+
+In addition to teachers, we will look for consultants who can help to assess 
+the results for each language. Please contact us!
+
+
+
+===The Summer School Committee===
+
+This committee consists of a number of teachers and informants, 
+who will select the participants. It will be selected by April 2009.
+
+
+===Time and Place===
+
+The summer school will
+be organized at the campus of Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg,
+Sweden, on 17-28 August 2009.
+
+Time schedule:
+- February: announcement of summer school
+- 20-29 April: on-line course
+- 12 May: submission deadline for assignment work
+- 31 May: review of assignments, notifications of acceptance
+- 15 June: **registration deadline**
+- 17-28 August: Summer School
+- September-December: homework on resource grammars
+- December: release of the extended Resource Grammar Library
+
+
+===Dissemination and intellectual property===
+
+The new resource grammars will be released under the LGPL just like 
+the current resource grammars,
+with the copyright held by respective authors.
+
+The grammars will be distributed via the GF web site.
+
+
+
+==Why I should participate==
+
+Seven reasons:
++ participation in a pioneering language technology work in an 
+  enthusiastic atmosphere
++ work and fun with people from all over Europe and the world
++ job opportunities and business ideas
++ credits: the school project will be established as a course at Chalmers worth
+  7.5 or 15 ETCS points per person, depending on the work accompliched; also 
+  extensions to Master's thesis will be considered (special credit arrangements
+  for [GSLT http://www.gslt.hum.gu.se/] and [NGSLT http://ngslt.org/])
++ merits: the resulting grammar can easily lead to a published paper (see below)
++ contribution to the multilingual and multicultural development of Europe and the
+  world
++ free trip and stay in Gothenburg (for travel grant students)
+
+
+==More information==
+
+[Course Google Group http://groups.google.com/group/gf-resource-school-2009/]
+
+[GF web page http://digitalgrammars.com/gf/]
+
+[GF tutorial http://digitalgrammars.com/gf/doc/gf-tutorial.html]
+
+[GF resource synopsis http://digitalgrammars.com/gf/lib/resource/doc/synopsis.html]
+
+[Resource-HOWTO document http://digitalgrammars.com/gf/doc/Resource-HOWTO.html]
+
+
+===Contact===
+
+Håkan Burden: burden at chalmers se
+
+Aarne Ranta: aarne at chalmers se
+
+
+
+===Selected publications from earlier resource grammar projects===
+
+K. Angelov.
+Type-Theoretical Bulgarian Grammar.
+In B. Nordström and A. Ranta (eds), 
+//Advances in Natural Language Processing (GoTAL 2008)//, 
+LNCS/LNAI 5221, Springer,
+2008.
+
+B. Bringert. 
+//Programming Language Techniques for Natural Language Applications//.
+Phd thesis, Computer Science, University of Gothenburg,
+2008.
+
+A. El Dada and A. Ranta.
+Implementing an Open Source Arabic Resource Grammar in GF.
+In M. Mughazy (ed),
+//Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XX. Papers from the Twentieth Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics, Kalamazoo, March 26//
+John Benjamins Publishing Company.
+2007.
+
+A. El Dada.
+Implementation of the Arabic Numerals and their Syntax in GF.
+Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages: Common Issues and Resources, 
+  ACL-2007 Workshop,
+June 28, 2007, Prague.
+2007.
+
+H. Hammarström and A. Ranta.
+Cardinal Numerals Revisited in GF.
+//Workshop on Numerals in the World's Languages//. 
+Dept. of Linguistics Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig,
+2004.
+
+M. Humayoun, H. Hammarström, and A. Ranta.
+Urdu Morphology, Orthography and Lexicon Extraction.
+//CAASL-2: The Second Workshop on Computational Approaches to Arabic Script-based Languages//,
+July 21-22, 2007, LSA 2007 Linguistic Institute, Stanford University.
+2007.
+
+K. Johannisson.
+//Formal and Informal Software Specifications.//
+Phd thesis, Computer Science, University of Gothenburg,
+2005.
+
+J. Khegai. 
+GF parallel resource grammars and Russian.
+In proceedings of ACL2006 
+  (The joint conference of the International Committee on Computational 
+  Linguistics and the Association for Computational Linguistics) (pp. 475-482),
+  Sydney, Australia, July 2006.
+
+J. Khegai. 
+//Language engineering in Grammatical Framework (GF)//.
+Phd thesis, Computer Science, Chalmers University of Technology,
+2006.
+
+W. Ng'ang'a. 
+Multilingual content development for eLearning in Africa. 
+eLearning Africa: 1st Pan-African Conference on ICT for Development, 
+  Education and Training. 24-26 May 2006, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
+2006.
+
+N. Perera and A. Ranta.
+Dialogue System Localization with the GF Resource Grammar Library.
+//SPEECHGRAM 2007: ACL Workshop on Grammar-Based Approaches to Spoken Language Processing//,
+June 29, 2007, Prague.
+2007.
+
+A. Ranta.
+Modular Grammar Engineering in GF.
+//Research on Language and Computation//, 
+5:133-158, 2007.
+
+A. Ranta.
+How predictable is Finnish morphology? An experiment on lexicon construction.
+In J. Nivre, M. Dahllöf and B. Megyesi (eds),
+//Resourceful Language Technology: Festschrift in Honor of Anna Sågvall Hein//,
+University of Uppsala,
+2008.
+
+A. Ranta. Grammars as Software Libraries.
+To appear in
+Y. Bertot, G. Huet, J-J. Lévy, and G. Plotkin (eds.),
+//From Semantics to Computer Science//,
+Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009.
+
+A. Ranta and K. Angelov.
+Implementing Controlled Languages in GF.
+To appear in the proceedings of //CNL 2009//.
+