EGRAM - A Grammar Development Environment and its Usage for Language Generation

The development of large grammars is inherently complex and can hardly be achieved using standard text editors. Although, e.g., emacs can be programmed to support this task to a certain extent, special-purpose functionalities are indispensable. Otherwise the increasing effort for the development and maintenance of large grammars may severely limit their applicability. To avoid this pitfall in the field of language generation, eGram has been developed, which provides a developer-friendly grammar format, syntactic verification of grammar knowledge, abbreviations through meta-rules, and integration with grammar testing. eGram is a implemented in Java and available under research or commercial licences.