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<Paper uid="P06-2062">
  <Title>GF Parallel Resource Grammars and Russian</Title>
  <Section position="8" start_page="480" end_page="481" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
6 Conclusion
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> GF resource grammars are general-purpose grammars used as a basis for building domain-specific application grammars. Among pluses of using such grammar library are guaranteed grammaticality, code reuse (both within and across languages) and higher abstraction level for writing application grammars. According to the &amp;quot;division of labor&amp;quot; principle, resource grammars comprise the necessary linguistic knowledge allowing application grammarians to concentrate on domain semantics.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Following Chomsky's universal grammar hypothesis (Chomsky, 1981), GF multilingual resource grammars maintain a common API for all supported languages. This is implemented using  GF's mechanism of separating between abstract and concrete syntax. Abstract syntax declares universal principles, while language-specific parameters are set in concrete syntax. We are not trying to answer the general question what constitutes universal grammar and what beyond universal grammar differentiates languages from one another. We look at GF parallel resource grammars as a way to simplify multilingual applications.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The implementation of the Russian resource grammar proves that GF grammar formalism allows us to use the language-independent API for describing sometimes rather peculiar grammatical variations in different languages. However, maintaining parallelism across languages has its limits. From the beginning we were trying to put as much as possible into a common interface, shared among all the supported languages. Word classes seem to be rather universal at least for the eleven supported languages. Syntactic types and some combination rules are more problematic. For example, some Russian rules only make sense as a part of language-specific modules while some rules that were considered universal at first are not directly applicable to Russian.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Having a universal resource API and grammars for other languages has made developing Russian grammar much easier comparing to doing it from scratch. The abstract syntax part was simply reused. Some concrete syntax implementations like adverb description, coordination and subordination required only minor changes. Even for more language-specific rules it helps a lot to have a template implementation that demonstrates what kind of phenomena should be taken into account.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> The GF resource grammar development is mostly driven by application domains like software specifications (Burke and Johannisson, 2005), math problems (Caprotti, 2006) or transport network dialog systems (Bringert et al., 2005). The structure of the resource grammar library is continually influenced by new domains and languages. The possible direction of GF parallel resource grammars' development is extending the universal interface by domain-specific and language-specific parts. Such adaptation seems to be necessary as the coverage of GF resource grammars grows.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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