PGF: A Portable Run-time Format for Type-theoretical Grammars

Journal article, 2010

Portable Grammar Format (PGF) is a core language for type-theoretical grammars. It is the target language to which grammars written in the high-level formalism Grammatical Framework (GF) are compiled. Low-level and simple, PGF is easy to reason about, so that its language-theoretic properties can be established. It is also easy to write interpreters that perform parsing and generation with PGF grammars, and compilers converting PGF to other formats. This paper gives a concise description of PGF, covering syntax, semantics, and parser generation. It also discusses the technique of embedded grammars, where language processing tasks defined by PGF grammars are integrated in larger systems.