ALEP-Based Distributed Grammar Engineering

Starting from a clarification concerning the notion of distributed grammar engineering, we present options of distributed grammar engineering as are supported by the ALEP grammar development platform and as were instantiated in the LS-GRAM project. The notion of distributed grammar engineering being grounded in the concepts of grammar modularization and grammar module integration, we focus on ALEP features providing operational support for these two concepts in terms of both data storage and internal classification of grammar code. We conclude with an indication of the major benefits of ALEP facilities for distributed grammar engineering and derive some general desiderata from this. 1 T w o N o t i o n s o f D i s t r i b u t e d G r a m m a r E n g i n e e r i n g According to our understanding, two notions of distributed grammar engineering (DGE) should be distinguished: (i) DGE meaning that tasks which jointly contribute to the development and maintenance of a grammatical resource are distributed over different persons working, perhaps, at different sites; (ii) DGE meaning that different domains of linguistic information, different layers of linguistic description are distributed over different processing (sub)tasks. Irrespective of this difference in notion, there is a fundamental presupposition common to both notions of DGE: that grammatical resources bear a modular structure, and that grammar modules being distributed over different authors or processing devices can neatly be integrated to form a coherent grammatical resource, respectively to support a coherent chain of processing tasks. Thus, as shown in Figure 1, the idea of DGE is firmly grounded in the concepts of modularization and integration: once grammar modularization is provided and integration of grammar modules is ensured, the option of DGE falls off as a side-effect.