The Feature Space in Parallel Grammar Writing

This paper discusses the methodology and tools applied in the Parallel Grammar project (ParGram) to support consistency and parallelism of linguistic representations across multilingual Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) grammars. A particular issue is that the grammars in the ParGram project are developed at different international sites. The approach that was established over several years relies on (i) a grammar code reviewing committee in which extensions to the existing representations are critically discussed, (ii) a technical tool for checking adherence to the bestpractice feature declaration for linguistic representations, and (iii) a coordinated, systematic use of templates for expressing generalizations across lexicon entries and grammar rules. We compare the techniques used in practical LFG development with elements of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG).