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<Paper uid="I05-2035">
  <Title>Rapid Prototyping of Scalable Grammars: Towards Modularity in Extensions to a Language-Independent Core</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Manual development of precise broad-coverage grammar implementations, useful in a range of natural language processing/understanding tasks, is a labor-intensive undertaking, requiring many years of work by highly trained linguists. Many recent efforts toward reducing the time and level of expertise needed to produce a new grammar have focused on adapting an existing grammar of another language (Butt et al., 2002; Kim et al., 2003; Bateman et al., ip). Our work on the 'Grammar Matrix' has pursued an alternative approach, identifying a set of language-independent grammar constraints to which language-specific constraints can be added (Bender et al., 2002). This approach has the hitherto unexploited potential to benefit from the substantial theoretical work on language typology. In this paper, we present a prototype Grammar Matrix customization system. This system draws on phenomenon-specific modules encoding dimensions of linguistic variation, presents the grammar developer with simple choices for each phenomenon, and then automatically generates a working starter-grammar, incorporating both the cross-linguistic Matrix core and language-specific constraints. The prototype addresses basic word order, sentential negation, yes-no questions, and a small range of lexical entries.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>