Grammatical Framework

Version 2.0

August 10, 2004.

News

August 10, 2004. GF 2.0 now released. Here are the highlights. Software available on the Download Page.

Older news

April 2, 2004. GF 2.0 beta version now released. Here are the highlights. Here is a source package which also includes documentation and example grammars. Comments and suggestions welcome!
June 25, 2003. GF 1.2 released with updated binaries, sources, and grammar packages. Here are the highlights.
May 25, 2003. A new version of the grammarian's tutorial, to be used in the ESSLLI summer school.
March 27, 2003. Gramlets: GF grammars compiled to Java applets. Try out a GF editor demo.
March 27, 2003. GF 1.1 released with updated binaries, sources, and grammar packages. Here are the highlights. Version 1.0 is still available as source package.
November 1, 2002. Started web page on resource grammars.
November 1, 2002. Get GF Zaurus applications here.
September 6, 2002. GF on Sharp Zaurus SL5500 PDA: picture. This was made possible by an excellent Hugs port for Zaurus. To learn more about Zaurus, read this review.

What is GF?

The Grammatical Framework (=GF) is a grammar formalism based on type theory. It consists of

a special-purpose programming language
a compiler of the language
a generic grammar processor

The compiler reads GF grammars from user-provided files, and the generic grammar processor performs various tasks with the grammars:

generation
parsing
translation
type checking
computation
paraphrasing
random and exhaustive generation
syntax editing

GF particularly addresses two aspects of grammars:

multilinguality (parallel grammars for different languages)
semantics (semantic conditions of well-formedness, semantic properties of expressions)

GF Version 2.0 adds the aspect of

modularity and grammar engineering.

GF is open-source software licensed under GNU General Public License (GPL).

Examples and demos

Numeral translator: recognizes and generates numbers from 1 to 999,999 in 80 languages. (The link goes to a live applet, which requires Java 1.5 plugin. Here is an example, which does not require the plugin.)

Letter editor: write simple letters in English, Finnish, French, Swedish, and Russian with a few mouse clicks.

Resource grammar library: basic structures of seven languages (English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Russian, Swedish). Resource grammars can be used as libraries for writing GF applications, but they can also be useful for language training.

Executable programs

GF is available precompiled for several platforms: Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, and Sun OS. For more information, see the Download Page.

Source code

The main part of GF is written in Haskell.

The platform-independent graphical user interface is written in Java.

Here is a GF source package, which includes a Makefile for different platforms and Haskell compilers. The Download Page gives more information on compiler requirements.

Here are some older source packages still available: GF 1.0, GF 0.976.

Documents

User's tutorial on editing in the Java interface.
Grammarian's tutorial on writing GF grammars, with exercises.
GF in 25 Minutes for programmers.
Grammatical Framework: A Type-Theoretical Grammar Formalism (ps.gz). Theoretical paper on GF by A. Ranta, appeared in The Journal of Functional Programming, vol. 14:2. 2004, pp. 145-189.
User Manual explaining the GF user interfaces and command language.
Language specification of the GF grammar formalism.
Highlights of Version 2.0 (in comparison with version 1.1).
Bibliography: publications on GF, as well as background literature.

Projects and events

TALK = Tools for Ambient Linguistic Knowledge. GF is used in implementing multimodal and multilingual dialogue systems.

KeY project on Integrated Deductive Software Design. GF is used for authoring informal and formal specifications. More details on the GF application here.

An introductory course on GF was given at the ESSLLI summer school in Vienna 2003.

Miscellaneous

Package of example GF grammars
Gramlets: GF grammars compiled to Java applets.
The GF Xerox Home Page with the oldest releases of and documents on GF, Version 0.54, 1999.
Earlier application: Natural-Language Interface to the proof editor Alfa.
The BNF Converter. A GF spin-off customized for the description of programming languages.
The Functional Morphology project. Creating infrastructure for GF and other linguistic applications.

Authors

The Languge Technology Group. More details on the Authors and Acknowledgements page.

Implementation project

Want to become a GF developer? Contact Aarne Ranta. Or just get the sources and start hacking.

Last modified by Aarne Ranta, August 10, 2004.