Chinese in the grammatical framework: Grammar, translation, and other applications

Abstract

Grammatical Framework (GF) is a grammar formalism based on type theory and functional programming. It is also a platform for multilingual applications such as translation, localization, and information retrieval. To enable non-linguist programmers to build linguistically precise applications, GF provides a Resource Grammar Library (RGL), which defines the basic syntax, morphology, and lexicon of languages in the form of easily usable software libraries. The RGL is an open-source collaborative project, which currently covers 30 languages with a shared tree structure. Chinese, in addition to basic RGL, has a translation lexicon of over 30,000 lemmas and a mobile translation app. This paper gives an overview of GF, emphasizing applications where Chinese is related to other languages. We also address the theoretical question how Chinese fits into the framework with a shared tree structure.