Grammar is now rehabilitated in language teaching and learning after years of debate and research on how best to teach grammar has produced a variety of options for the teachers to follow in their classrooms. The present study reports 30 Bangladeshi university EFL teachers’ attitudes towards grammar and its teaching and learning relating to those options. An analysis of their responses indicate...

The development of precision grammars is an inherently resource-intensive process; their complexity means that changes made to one area of a grammar often introduce unexpected flow-on effects elsewhere in the grammar which may only be discovered after some time has been invested in updating numerous test suite items. In this paper, we present the browser-based gDelta tool, which aims to provide...

This paper describes Grammar Learning by Partition Search, a general method for automatically constructing grammars for a range of parsing tasks. Given a base grammar, a training corpus, and a parsing task, Partition Search constructs an optimised probabilistic context-free grammar by searching a space of nonterminal set partitions, looking for a partition that maximises parsing performance and...

This paper presents a novel grammar formalism, Synchronous Tree Unification Grammar (STUG), that borrows ideas from two rather distinct exemplars of tree-based grammar formalisms, namely Synchronous Tree Adjoining Grammar and Tree Unification Grammar. At the same time STUG differs considerably from those in that it allows for a clean separation of syntax and valency. Exploiting this potential i...

We propose a novel context-free grammar representation for parsing libraries in a pure programming language. Our representation explicitizes the recursion in the grammar, thus avoiding fundamental limitations of the grammar model currently employed by parser combinator libraries. Additionally, we decouple the grammar from its semantic actions using techniques from the Multirec generic programmi...

Polarized unification grammar (PUG) is a linguistic formalism which uses polarities to better control the way grammar fragments interact. The grammar combination operation of PUG was conjectured to be associative. We show that PUG grammar combination is not associative, and even attaching polarities to objects does not make it order-independent. Moreover, we prove that no non-trivial polarity s...