Grammatical Framework
Version 2.3
July 1, 2005.
News
July 1, 2005. GF 2.3 released.
Download from
SourceForge.
The GF history lists changes.
The source package on SourceForge also contains a new GUI and some new grammars.
June 3, 2005. Started a page on
history of changes.
These changes will appear soon in releases.
May 17, 2005. Version 2.2 released. See
highlights.
Download from
SourceForge.
May 12, 2005. GF now has a mailing list, to which you can register
here.
GF also has a project page on SourceForge,
https://sourceforge.net/projects/gf-tools,
but this page does not yet have much content.
May 9, 2005.
PhD Thesis by
Kristofer Johannisson:
Formal and Informal Software Specifications.
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 GF 2.1 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.
Demo film
of a multimodal dialogue system built with embedded grammars.
Resource grammar library:
basic structures of ten languages
(Danish, English, Finnish, French, German,
Italian, Norwegian, Russian, Spanish, 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 for
several platforms: Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, and Sun OS.
To get GF, go to the
Download Page
(at SourceForge).
Quick start
When you have downloaded and installed GF, you can try one of the
quick start examples.
Source code
The main part of GF is written in
Haskell.
The platform-independent graphical user interface is written in
Java.
The
Download Page (at SourceForge) gives links to source and binary packages, as well as
information on compiler requirements.
For Java programmers: GF grammars can be embedded in Java programs by using the
Embedded GF Interpreter.
Documents
New Grammarian's Tutorial,
based on the module system (unfinished).
More up-to-date but ess detailed than the next one.
Old Grammarian's Tutorial
on writing GF grammars, with exercises.
Editor User Manual
on editing in the Java interface.
GF in 25 Minutes - overview for programmer audience.
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.
Also serves as language document.
Module system document, complements the
previous paper by a description of the module system.
User Manual explaining the GF user interfaces and command language (slightly
outdated).
Language specification of the GF grammar formalism.
Resource grammar library documentation.
Highlights of Version 2.1 and 2.0 (in comparison with version 1.2).
Slides on GF theory and implementation given
at INRIA Rocquencourt in December 2003.
Slides on multilingual grammar engineering and some examples of
using the modules system of GF 2.0.
PhD Thesis by
Peter Ljunglöf:
Expressivity and Complexity of the Grammatical Framework.
Language-theoretical study of GF and its parsing problem.
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.
WebALT,
Web Advanced Learning Technologies. GF is used as for generating multilingual
teaching material.
Project Efficient
at Tudor Institute, Luxembourg, "atelier de prototypage de transactions d'e-commerce".
GF is used as an authoring tool for business models.
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
examples/gfcc in the GF grammar library
(see GF download page).
An early version of the GF Home Page
last updated for GF, Version 1.2, 2003.
The original
GF Xerox Home Page
with the oldest releases of and documents on GF, up to Version 0.54, 1999,
does not seem to exist any more.
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,
May 17, 2005.