---
title: "A Formalism and Environment for the Development of a Large Grammar of English"
authors:
  - "Ted Briscoe"
  - "Claire Grover"
  - "Branimir Boguraev"
  - "John A. Carroll"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1987/140"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1987/0140.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Tenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 1987
pages: "703-707"
track: "Natural Language"
keywords:
---

# A Formalism and Environment for the Development of a Large Grammar of English

Ted Briscoe, Claire Grover, Branimir Boguraev, John A. Carroll

*Proceedings of the Tenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 703-707.

## Abstract

Natural language grammars with large coverage are typically the result of many person-years of effort, working with clumsy formalisms and sub-optimal software support for grammar development. This paper describes our approach to the task of writing a substantial grammar, as part of a collaboration to produce a general purpose morphological and syntactic analyser for English. The grammatical formalism we have developed for the task is a metagrammatical notation which is a more expressive and computationally tractable variant of Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar. We have also implemented a software system which provides a highly integrated and very powerful set of tools for developing and managing a large grammar based on this notation. The system provides a grammarian with an environment which we have found to be essential for rapid but successful production of a substantial grammar.