Third GF Summer School 2013
Frontiers of Multilingual Technology

Special theme of 2013: Scaling Up Grammatical Resources

Frauenchiemsee island, Bavaria
18^th–30^th August, 2013

About

Grammatical Framework (GF), grammaticalframework.org, is a multilingual grammar formalism based on the idea of a shared abstract syntax and mappings between the abstract syntax and concrete languages. GF has hundreds of users all over the world.

The GF Resource Grammar Library (RGL) implements the morphology (inflection) and basic syntax (phrase structure) of some 26 languages: Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hindi, Interlingua, Japanese, Italian, Latvian, Nepali, Norwegian bokmål, Persian, Polish, Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Sindhi, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, and Urdu. These resources are freely available as open-source software. More languages are under construction, in both in-house and external projects (Greek and Maltese forthcoming by the summer school).

We are constantly welcoming new languages, especially from new language families, as well as EU languages not yet covered by the Resource Grammar Library (Estonian, Lithuanian, Irish, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Slovene, and Portuguese). Learn more at the RGL status page. The Summer School is an excellent place to get started with a new language.

This year's special theme of “Scaling up Grammar Resources” means extending the existing resource grammars with the ultimate goal of dealing with any text in the supported languages. Lexicon extension is an obvious part of this work, but also new grammatical constructions are of interest. Porting resources from other open-source approaches, such as WordNets and Apertium, is one method of doing this. And reciprocally, we want to make GF resources easily reusable in other approaches.

Schedule

First week (18-23 August):
Introduction to GF and multilingual grammar programming

• Tutorial on using the GF resource grammar library for small applications
• Tutorial on the GF programming language
• Tutorial on how to write a miniature resource grammar (morphology, paradigms, syntax)
• Tutorial on complexity aspects, grammar compilation, portable grammar format
• Tutorial on using new GF-tools like Eclipse IDE and GF Cloud

Tutorials will be given in morning sessions; supervised exercises in the afternoon will make the attendants familiar with programming in GF.

Second week (25-30 August):
Advanced work in specialized tracks

• Resource Grammar track: large-scale grammar implementation for a new language
• Application track: web applications, ontologies
• Theory track: type theory, parsing, compiler issues
• Hybrid systems: connection with statistical methods

In the mornings, each day is dedicated to a special track, with plenary talks attended by all participants. For the afternoons we want to organize group work on the various tracks, and have the participants choose which group they join. On the last day, results of these groups will be presented to all participants.

Teachers

The following list is still to be confirmed and completed.

• Krasimir Angelov, U Gothenburg
• Thomas Hallgren, U Gothenburg
• Hans Leiß, LMU Munich
• Laurette Pretorius, U South Africa
• Aarne Ranta, U Gothenburg
• Mike Rosner, U Malta
• Christina Unger, U Bielefeld
• others (to be announced)

Venue

The summer school will take place at the Frauenwörth Monastery, on Frauenchiemsee island in Chiemsee lake, Bavaria, Germany (map).

Getting to Frauenwörth

By plane

1. Fly to Munich Airport.
2. Take S-Bahn line 8 to Munich East Station (Ostbahnhof), then the train to Prien at Lake Chiem. (S-Bahn/train timetable: Munich Airport - Prien)
3. From Prien train station to the lake harbour Prien-Stock you can walk (1.8 km, 20 min), or go by bus, taxi or Chiemsee-railway (8 min).
4. At Prien-Stock, take the boat to the Fraueninsel (about 30 min. ride, roughly every 45 minutes). The last boat for the island leaves Prien-Stock at 19.30 (boat timetable).
5. The nunnery is next to the landing pier, to the left.

By train

By car

1. Autobahn A8 from Munich into the direction of Salzburg; exit "Bernau", via Prien into the direction of Rimsting/Breitbrunn to Gstadt.
2. Park your car (no cars allowed to the island), there is sufficient parking space.
3. Take the ship to the Fraueninsel (about 10 min. ride).

Accomodation and travel costs

Accomodation will be in the Benedictine abbey of Frauenorth on Frauenchiemsee island. There are some rooms in categories A (€55/night), B (€45/night), and C (€30/night, no showers). Approximate costs breakdown:

Registration

We have now opened a registration for those of you who wish to express your interest in attending. Precise details about costs/payments will follow soon.

To receive updates about the event, kindly join the Google Group.

Contact

If you have any questions about the summer school you can contact us below:

• Head organiser: Hans Leiß, leiss at cis dot uni-muenchen dot de
• Co-organiser: Aarne Ranta, aarne at chalmers dot se
• Web/registration: John J. Camilleri, john dot j dot camilleri at chalmers dot se

Sponsor

Previous summer schools

• GF Resource Grammar Summer School (2009) in Gothenburg, Sweden
• Second GF Summer School (2011) in Barcelona, Spain