Generating LFGs with a MetaGrammar

In this paper, we build up on the work presented in (Clement & Kinyon 03), and (Kinyon and Rambow03): we present the notion of MetaGrammar, which was originally successfully used to ease the development and maintenance of large Tree-Adjoining Grammars. We explain how we reuse the notion of MetaGrammar in order to generate LFGs. The main idea is that a compact MetaGrammar hierarchy is hand-crafted, from which large grammars are automatically generated offline. We argue that MetaGrammar hierarchies should abstract as much as possible from any given syntactic framework and machinery, and be closer to “descriptive linguistics” in order to facilitate porting hierarchies from one framework to another. We also discuss work in progress such as generating grammars for different languages and frameworks from a single MetaGrammar hierarchy.