Automating the Generation of a Wide-coverage LFG for French using a MetaGrammar

In this paper, we explain how the notion of MetaGrammar, which has successfully been used for generating wide-coverage tree adjoining grammars (TAGs) for various languages such as French (Abeillé et al. (1999)) and German (Gerdes (2002)), may be used to generate a wide-coverage Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) for French. We first introduce the notion of MetaGrammar and present the tools we use to automatically generate, from a compact MetaGrammar hierarchy, a LFG for French: the grammar writer specifies in compact manner syntactic properties that are usually encoded separately in the LFG machinery in the lexicon, in lexical rules and in rewriting rules. From this hierarchy an LFG is automatically generated. We also propose an augmentation of the existing MetaGrammar tool.