Language Engineering in Grammatical Framework (GF)

This thesis describes a number of practical experiments rather than theoreticalinvestigations in the area of natural language processing. The basis forthe work presented is Grammatical Framework (GF). It is a very complexsystem, which comprises among other things a grammar formalism based ontype theory and its implementation written in Haskell. GF is intended forhigh-quality machine translation (of INTERLINGUA type) in the restrictedlanguage domains.The primary concern of this thesis is however limited to the usage of GFas a piece of software. The main results are: Implementing a syntax editor, which provides a graphical user interface(GUI) for the command-line GF core. Writing a part of code for automatic generation of gramletspure Javaprograms with limited (compared to GF) functionality that can be runon PDA (Portable Device Assistants) and as applets in a browser. Writing the Russian resource grammar that takes care of the most basicmorphological and syntactic rules and serves as a standard libraryfor building application grammars (describing restricted language domains)in Russian.These results contribute to language engineering in GF on two differentlevels: Author level (end-user) constructing sentences in natural languages. Grammarian level building a grammar description, which is laterused on the author level.The last part of the thesis deals with a non-linguistic domain. In thatexperiment we try to apply functional parsing technique to the well-knownproblem of protein secondary structure prediction (bioinformatics)