Grammatical Framework
Version 2.1
November 8, 2004.
News
March 15, 2005.
Master's thesis by
Björn Bringert on
Embedded grammars:
GF grammars that can be used as parts of Java programs. And a
demo film
of a multimodal dialogue system built with embedded grammars.
November 9, 2004.
PhD Thesis by
Peter Ljunglöf:
Expressivity and Complexity of the Grammatical Framework.
November 8, 2004. GF 2.1 released.
Here are the highlights.
Software available on the Download
Page.
Main novelties in 2.1:
multiple inheritance of grammar modules,
speech recognition grammar generation,
lots of bug fixes.
Version 2.0 still available
on the GF 2.0 Download Page.
If you need something from the previous version of the web page, it is
still available:
GF 1.2.
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.
The Download Page
gives links to source and binary packages, as well as
information on compiler requirements.
Documents
Some of the documents have not yet been updated for GF 2.0.
See the
Highlights of Version 2.0 for the main differences.
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
Gramlets:
GF grammars compiled to Java applets.
GFCC:
report on a compiler from a fragment of C to JVM, written in GF.
The compiler source code can be found in the directory
lib/imperative in the GF grammar library.
Previous version of the GF Home Page
last updated for GF, Version 1.2, 2003.
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,
November 8, 2004.