<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<Paper uid="C04-1001">
  <Title>Grammar Modularity and its Impact on Grammar Documentation</Title>
  <Section position="7" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
6 Conclusion and Outlook
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> In this paper, we discussed the importance of maintainability and documentation in grammar development. A modular and transparent design of the grammar and detailed documentation are prerequisites for reusability of the grammar code in general. A modularized grammar is &amp;quot;intensionally transparent&amp;quot;, as we put it, and thus favours maintainability. However, for casual users of the grammar, modularity may result in decreased readability. This is related to the fact that grammar modules are not black boxes, since they encode linguistic generalizations. We argued that this can be compensated for by a special documentation technique, which allows for user-friendly documentation that is independent of the structure of the grammar code.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Similar to common grammar-specific tools that are provided by grammar development environments, we propose a grammar-specific documentation technique (which ought to be integrated into the grammar development environments, as also suggested by Erbach and Uszkoreit (1990), Erbach (1992)).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Our XML-based documentation technique is a very powerful means that can be exploited to support the difficult task of grammar (and documentation) development in various further ways. For instance, the grammar code can be &amp;quot;translated&amp;quot; to a pure XML document, i.e. each atomic element of the code (syntactic categories such as NP; f-structure elements, e.g. &amp;quot;, SUBJ, =) is marked by a tag. This markup can be used in various ways, for instance: - The grammar code can be displayed with refined highlighting, e.g. c-structure and f-structure elements can be printed in different colours. This improves the transparency and readability of the code.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> - The grammar code can be mapped to a representation that uses annotated trees instead of rules. This may result in a better understanding of the code. (However, the mapping to the annotated-tree representation is not trivial, since c-structure rules make use of regular expressions.)</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>