Joint Grammar Development by Linguists and Computer Scientists

For languages with inflectional morphology, development of a morphological parser can be a bottleneck to further development. We focus on two difficulties: first, finding people with expertise in both computer programming and the linguistics of a particular language, and second, the short lifetime of software such as parsers. We describe a methodology to split parser building into two tasks: descriptive grammar development, and formal grammar development. The two grammars are combined into a single document using Literate Programming. The formal grammar is designed to be independent of a particular parsing engine’s programming language, so that it can be readily ported to a new parsing engine, thus helping solve the software lifetime problem.

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