---
title: "The Parallel Grammar Project — Butt 2002"
description: "Building a large grammar development platform takes a lot of effort, so it pays off only if one platform can serve many languages and many purposes."
authors: ["Miriam Butt", "Helge Dyvik", "Tracy Holloway King", "Hiroshi Masuichi", "Christian Rohrer"]
year: 2002
venue: "COLING-02: Grammar Engineering and Evaluation"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/W02-1503/"
licence: "CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/butt-2002-parallel-grammar-project/"
---
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# The Parallel Grammar Project

**Authors:** [Miriam Butt](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/miriam-butt/), [Helge Dyvik](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/helge-dyvik/), [Tracy Holloway King](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/tracy-holloway-king/), Hiroshi Masuichi, Christian Rohrer · **Institutions:** [University of Stuttgart](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/university-of-stuttgart/) · [University of Manchester](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/university-of-manchester/) · [Palo Alto Research Center](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/labs/palo-alto-research-center/) · [University of Bergen](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/university-of-bergen/) · [Institut für Mikroelektronik Stuttgart](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/labs/institut-fur-mikroelektronik-stuttgart/) · Fuji Xerox · **Year:** 2002 · **Venue:** COLING-02: Grammar Engineering and Evaluation · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/W02-1503/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/W02-1503.pdf) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2035955017)

**Citations:** 293 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) · [99](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/butt-2002-parallel-grammar-project/cited-by/) in our library, of the 140884 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
Building a large grammar development platform takes a lot of effort, so it pays off only if one platform can serve many languages and many purposes. The ParGram project tests this with the XLE parser and the Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) formalism. It also asks how far analyses can stay parallel across very different languages. Grammars for English, French, German, Japanese, Norwegian and Urdu are written at separate sites. They follow shared conventions:

- **c-structures** (trees) may differ to reflect each language's word order and constituency;
- **f-structures** (feature structures) are kept as uniform as possible, for example for imperatives, specifiers and interrogatives;
- **departures from parallelism** are allowed only when the language really requires them, as with predicate adjectives in Japanese versus English.

Parallelism is maintained through meetings twice a year, where sample analyses are compared and feature inventories are checked against each other. The authors report a high degree of parallelism and fast bootstrapping of new grammars, with Japanese reaching broad coverage in about 18 months. This matters because uniform analyses make multilingual applications, such as machine translation, simpler.

## Key points
- The project started in 1994 with English, French and German. Japanese, Norwegian and Urdu were added later. All grammars use XLE and LFG.
- Grammar size (rule categories / FSM states / arcs):
  - German: 444 / 4883 / 15870
  - English: 310 / 4935 / 13268
  - French: 132 / 1116 / 2674
  - Japanese: 50 / 333 / 1193
  - Norwegian: 46 / 255 / 798
  - Urdu: 25 / 106 / 169
- The Japanese grammar was begun in early 2001 by two grammar writers. Within about 1.5 years it covered 99% of 500 sentences from a copier manual and 95% of 10,000 sentences from an eCRM (Voice-of-Customer) corpus.
- The Norwegian grammar joined in 1999 and took roughly two man-years of work. It adds a semantic projection and adapts a lexicon of about 80,000 lemmas to XLE. The Urdu grammar experiments with an argument-structure level.
- For comparison, the paper mentions LS-GRAM (nine languages, ALEP platform, 1994–1996, smaller coverage) and the Verbmobil HPSG grammars (LKB and PAGE platforms, aimed at spoken language).

## Interesting ideas
- **Unify the abstract layer, not the surface.** Each language keeps its own tree structure, but all grammars agree on the functional representation. Multilingual annotation schemes could use the same split: language-specific surface layers mapped onto a common abstract layer.
- **Compare feature inventories across grammars.** Lining up every grammar's features and values does more than fix naming clashes (e.g. GEN vs. GEND). A missing feature, such as one for adjective degree, signals that a construction may be unanalyzed or analyzed inconsistently. Diffing tagsets or schemas this way could audit coverage in any multi-team resource.
- **Pilot new analyses in one grammar first.** A tentative analysis is implemented in a single grammar, which reports back, and the others adopt it only if it works. This keeps experimentation cheap while protecting consistency.
- **Allow principled exceptions.** Parallelism is dropped only when it would misrepresent a language, and even then languages that can share an analysis still do. This is a useful rule for cross-lingual standards generally.
- **Bootstrap from existing grammars.** A new grammar starts by reusing shared techniques and parsing equivalent sentences in existing grammars to see how they analyze them. This lets developers spend their effort on language-specific constructions, a useful model for starting resources for a new language such as Ukrainian.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

Fields: [Natural language processing](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/nlp/)

Topics: [Syntax & grammar formalisms](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/syntax-grammar/)

## Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{butt2002parallel,
  title = {{The Parallel Grammar Project}},
  author = {Butt, Miriam and Dyvik, Helge and King, Tracy Holloway and Masuichi, Hiroshi and Rohrer, Christian},
  booktitle = {COLING-02: Grammar Engineering and Evaluation},
  year = {2002},
  doi = {10.3115/1118783.1118786},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/1118783.1118786}
}
```

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## References

9 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

1. Joan Bresnan. 2001. Lexical-Functional Syntax. Blackwell. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Joan+Bresnan%2E+2001%2E+Lexical%2DFunctional+Syntax%2E+Blackwell%2E)
2. Miriam Butt, Tracy Holloway King, Marı́a-Eugenia Niño, and Frédérique Segond. 1999. A Grammar Writer’s Cookbook. CSLI Publications. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Miriam+Butt%2C+Tracy+Holloway+King%2C+Mar%C4%B1%CC%81a%2DEugenia+Nin%CC%83o%2C+and+Fre%CC%81de%CC%81rique+Segond%2E+1999%2E+A+Grammar+Writer%E2%80%99s+Cookbook%2E+CSLI+Publications%2E)
3. Ann Copestake. 2002. Implementing Typed Feature Structure Grammars. CSLI Publications. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Ann+Copestake%2E+2002%2E+Implementing+Typed+Feature+Structure+Grammars%2E+CSLI+Publications%2E)
4. Berthold Crysmann, Anette Frank, Bernd Keifer, St. Müller, Günter Neumann, Jakub Piskorski, Ulrich Schäfer, Melanie Siegel, Hans Uszkoreit, Feiyu Xu, Markus Becker, and Hans-Ulrich Krieger. 2002. An integrated architecture for shallow and deep parsing. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the… [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Berthold+Crysmann%2C+Anette+Frank%2C+Bernd+Keifer%2C+St%2E+Mu%CC%88ller%2C+Gu%CC%88nter+Neumann%2C+Jakub+Piskorski%2C+Ulrich+Scha%CC%88fer%2C+Melanie+Siegel%2C+Hans+Uszkoreit%2C+Feiyu+Xu%2C+Markus+Becker%2C+and+Hans%2DUlrich+Krieger%2E+2002%2E+A)
5. Anette Frank. 1999. From parallel grammar development towards machine translation. In Proceedings of MT Summit VII, pages 134–142. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Anette+Frank%2E+1999%2E+From+parallel+grammar+development+towards+machine+translation%2E+In+Proceedings+of+MT+Summit+VII%2C+pages+134%E2%80%93142%2E)
6. John T. Maxwell, III and Ron Kaplan. 1993. The interface between phrasal and functional constraints. Computational Lingusitics, 19:571–589. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=John+T%2E+Maxwell%2C+III+and+Ron+Kaplan%2E+1993%2E+The+interface+between+phrasal+and+functional+constraints%2E+Computational+Lingusitics%2C+19%3A571%E2%80%93589%2E)
7. Stefan Riezler, Tracy Holloway King, Ronald Kaplan, Dick Crouch, John T. Maxwell, III, and Mark Johnson. 2002. Parsing the wall street journal using a lexical-functional grammar and discriminative estimation techniques. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Lingui… [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Stefan+Riezler%2C+Tracy+Holloway+King%2C+Ronald+Kaplan%2C+Dick+Crouch%2C+John+T%2E+Maxwell%2C+III%2C+and+Mark+Johnson%2E+2002%2E+Parsing+the+wall+street+journal+using+a+lexical%2Dfunctional+grammar+and+discriminative+est) [our card](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/riezler-2002-parsing-wall-street-journal-lexical/)
8. Paul Schmidt, Sibylle Rieder, Axel Theofilidis, and Thierry Declerck. 1996. Lean formalisms, linguistic theory, and applications: Grammar development in alep. In Proceedings of COLING. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Paul+Schmidt%2C+Sibylle+Rieder%2C+Axel+Theofilidis%2C+and+Thierry+Declerck%2E+1996%2E+Lean+formalisms%2C+linguistic+theory%2C+and+applications%3A+Grammar+development+in+alep%2E+In+Proceedings+of+COLING%2E)
9. Wolfgang Wahlster, editor. 2000. Verbmobil: Foundations of Speech-to-Speech Translation. Springer. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Wolfgang+Wahlster%2C+editor%2E+2000%2E+Verbmobil%3A+Foundations+of+Speech%2Dto%2DSpeech+Translation%2E+Springer%2E)