A Cloud-Based Editor for Multilingual Grammars

Writing deep linguistic grammars has been considered a highly specialized skill, requiring the use of tools with steep learning curves and complex installation procedures. As the use of statistical methods has increased, new generations of computational linguists are getting less and less prepared for grammar writing tasks. In an aim to provide a better learning experience for grammar writers, we present a grammar engineering tool that resides in the cloud. It has been used in several tutorial courses and self-studies, and it allows absolute beginners to write their first grammars and parse examples in 10 minutes. The cloud-based grammar engineering tool is built on top of GF (Grammatical Framework), a grammar formalism that has an explicit tecto/phenogrammar distinction, is based on ideas from type theory and functional programming and comes equipped with a grammar library supporting 30 languages.