Metagrammar engineering: Towards systematic exploration of implemented grammars

When designing grammars of natural language, typically, more than one formal analysis can account for a given phenomenon. Moreover, because analyses interact, the choices made by the engineer influence the possibilities available in further grammar development. The order in which phenomena are treated may therefore have a major impact on the resulting grammar. This paper proposes to tackle this problem by using metagrammar development as a methodology for grammar engineering. I argue that metagrammar engineering as an approach facilitates the systematic exploration of grammars through comparison of competing analyses. The idea is illustrated through a comparative study of auxiliary structures in HPSG-based grammars for German and Dutch. Auxiliaries form a central phenomenon of German and Dutch and are likely to influence many components of the grammar. This study shows that a special auxiliary+verb construction significantly improves efficiency compared to the standard argument-composition analysis for both parsing and generation.