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ParGramWiki

Welcome to PargramWiki, a wiki for documenting the ParGram project and its process. The wiki is permanently under construction. If you would like to have a user account, please contact Jessica Zipf.

Useful Links

• ParGram Homepage
• ParGram Workspace : Here, you can find meeting notes/slides/other material from past ParGram meetings and a search interface. The site was implemented by Anja Leiderer. If you would like access to this site (it is currently password protected), please contact Jessica Zipf.
• ParGram Starter Grammars: Some of the knowledge accumulated in the ParGram effort over the years has been included as part of the XLE Documentation in terms of a Starter Grammar, A Walk Through and files containing features and templates that grammars have developed (and used in common). Grammar Writers who are just beginning work on a new language will find this repository of information helpful. In particular, common features and conventions developed within ParGram are explained as part of the Starter Grammar.
• Starter Grammar, Walk Through and some useful tips: http://ling.uni-konstanz.de/pages/xle/doc/
• Common Features & Common Templates: For files, see bottom of the page.

ParGram Topics

Members of ParGram have been meeting regularly since 1995 and have come together in so-called _Feature Committee_ meetings in which analyses across grammars are compared and discussed. As far as possible, common analyses and naming conventions are agreed upon. Some of the body of cross linguistic grammar engineering knowledge that has been accumulated was documented in the Grammar Writer's Cookbook (http://www.stanford.edu/group/cslipublications/cslipublications/site/1575861704.shtml). The material in this Wiki is an effort to share further knowledge that we have established together over the years with the wider community.

Here are some discussions and information about ParGram topics (in alphabetical order).

M-structure

• CHECK feature

• Complex Predicates

• Discourse Functions

• Modality

• Negation

• Tense Aspect Mood

• Nouns

• Testsuites

• Questions

• Predicatives

• Non Latin Scripts

Links to ParGram Groups

Here are some links to the Wikis or sites of individual grammar groups. It might be useful to check out languages that are similar to the one you wish to work on (or are working on). If you would like to obtain a particular ParGram grammar, you should contact the groups directly. For example, the Polish grammar is available under the GNU General Public License (version 3).

• HunGram Hungarian Grammar: http://hungram.unideb.hu

• POLFIE Polish LFG/XLE grammar: http://zil.ipipan.waw.pl/LFG

• Urdu ParGram Grammar: http://ling.uni-konstanz.de/pages/home/pargram_urdu

• Norwegian ParGram Grammar: http://clarino.uib.no/redmine/projects/inesspublic/wiki/NorGram_documentation

XLE

XLE consists of cutting-edge algorithms for parsing and generating Lexical Functional Grammars (LFGs) along with a rich graphical user interface for writing and debugging such grammars. It is the basis for the ParGram project, which is developing industrial-strength grammars for English, French, German, Norwegian, Japanese, and Urdu. XLE is written in C and uses Tcl/Tk for the user interface. It currently runs on Solaris Unix, Linux, and Mac OS X.

More information on XLE including its availability can be found on the XLE homepage at: http://ling.uni-konstanz.de/pages/xle/

XLE-Web Interface

The XLE-Web Interface allows access to several ParGram grammars. One very good way of gaining an understanding of how different phenomena are treated within ParGram is to go to this website and parse example sentences online.

The XLE-Web interface along with several ParGram grammars is here:

• XLE-Web Interface: http://clarino.uib.no/iness/xle-web

ParGramBank

ParGramBank is a collection of parallel treebanks currently involving ten languages from six language families. All treebanks included in ParGramBank are constructed using output from individual ParGram grammars. The grammars produce output that is maximally parallelized across languages and language families. This output forms the basis of a parallel treebank covering a diverse set of phenomena.

The treebank is publicly available via the INESS treebanking environment, which also allows for the alignment of language pairs. ParGramBank is a unique, multilayered parallel treebank that represents more and different types of languages than are available in other treebanks, that represents deep linguistic knowledge and that allows for the alignment of sentences at several levels: dependency structures, constituency structures and POS information.

ParGramBank can be accessed and downloaded for free via the INESS treebanking infrastructure:

• INESS treebanking infrastructure: http://clarino.uib.no/iness/page