DotCCG and VisCCG: Wiki and Programming Paradigms for Improved Grammar Engineering with OpenCCG
Jason Baldridge, Sudipta Chatterjee, Alexis Palmer, Ben Wing · 2007
We present a suite of tools for simplifying the creation and maintenance of grammars for the OpenCCG parsing and realization system. The core of our approach relies on a terse but expressive textual format, DotCCG, for declaring CCG grammars. It supports powerful string expansions that allow grammar developers to eliminate redundancy in the declaration of both morphology and category definitions. Grammars written in this format are converted into the XML utilized by OpenCCG using theccg2xml utility, which –like a programming language compiler – provides information regarding errors in the grammar, including the type of error and the line number on which it occurs. DotCCG grammars can be edited with VisCCG, a graphical interface which provides visualization of various components of the grammar and allows local editing of information in a manner inspired by wikis. We also report on resources developed to facilitate wide use of the OpenCCG tool suite presented in this paper and on recent uses of the tools in both academic research and classroom environments. 1