--- title: "Grammar Engineering for CCG using Ant and XSLT — Martin 2009" description: "They propose treating these steps as part of a process that is continually refined. 6 references." authors: ["Scott Martin", "Rajakrishnan Rajkumar", "Michael White"] year: 2009 venue: "Proceedings of the Workshop on Software Engineering, Testing, and Quality Assurance for Natural Language Processing (SETQA-NLP 2009)" source: "https://aclanthology.org/W09-1508/" 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/martin-2009-grammar-engineering-ccg-ant-xslt/" --- [Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/martin-2009-grammar-engineering-ccg-ant-xslt/) [home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/) / [2009](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2009/page/2/) / Grammar Engineering for CCG using Ant and XSLT # Grammar Engineering for CCG using Ant and XSLT **Authors:** [Scott Martin](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/scott-martin/), [Rajakrishnan Rajkumar](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/rajakrishnan-rajkumar/) and [Michael White](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/michael-white/) · **Year:** 2009 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the Workshop on Software Engineering, Testing, and Quality Assurance for Natural Language Processing (SETQA-NLP 2009) · **Publisher:** [Association for Computational Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/association-for-computational-linguistics/) · **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/W09-1508/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/W09-1508.pdf) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2072403697) **Citations:** 1 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) ## Summary The authors challenge the widespread notion that corpus conversion and grammar extraction are done once and never revisited. They propose treating these steps as part of a process that is continually refined. The input is the standard CCGbank. The system adds information to it that is absent from the original: Propbank roles, head lexicalization for case-marking prepositions, derivation restructuring for the analysis of punctuation, named entities, and lemmas. First, the corpus is converted to XML using JavaCC. Then a chain of XSLT transformations, orchestrated by Apache Ant, produces the converted corpus and a grammar in OpenCCG format. The corpus and the grammar remain consistent with each other, which is useful for machine learning, in particular for realization ranking. Configuration is factored out into Ant tasks, separate from the code, so experiments do not require recompilation and different strategies can be tested more quickly. The resulting grammar achieved state-of-the-art BLEU for surface realization on Section 23 of CCGbank. The authors emphasize that improvements to the engineering process itself mattered as much as better statistical models. ## Key points - Input: CCGbank (Hockenmaier and Steedman, 2007). Output: a converted corpus in XML and an OpenCCG grammar. - The corpus is augmented with Propbank roles, head lexicalization for case-marking prepositions, derivation restructuring for punctuation, named entity annotation, and lemmatization. - Tools: Ant's built-in javacc task (which runs JavaCC to convert to XML), two custom Ant tasks, `convert` and `extract`, and the Ant data types FileSet and FileList. - Result: state-of-the-art BLEU for surface realization on Section 23 of CCGbank. The extracted text gives no specific figures. - Future plans: increase the number of single-rooted LFs and integrate the system with OpenCCG. *Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.* ## Institutions - [The Ohio State University](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/the-ohio-state-university/) — University, Columbus, United States · 90 works · 19,112 citations 📚 Shelves (4): [🖥️ Computer Science](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/computer-science/) · 18,614 works · [🤖 Artificial Intelligence](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/computer-science/artificial-intelligence/) · 17,965 works · [🎭 Arts and Humanities](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/) · 17,450 works · [🗣️ Language and Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/language-and-linguistics/) · 17,296 works 🧭 Topics (1): [📐 Syntax & grammar formalisms](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/syntax-grammar/) · 221 works ## Cite Cite as: Scott Martin, Rajakrishnan Rajkumar and Michael White. 2009. Grammar Engineering for CCG using Ant and XSLT. Proceedings of the Workshop on Software Engineering, Testing, and Quality Assurance for Natural Language Processing (SETQA-NLP 2009). The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. ```bibtex @inproceedings{martin2009grammar, title = {{Grammar Engineering for CCG using Ant and XSLT}}, author = {Scott Martin, Rajakrishnan Rajkumar and Michael White}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Workshop on Software Engineering, Testing, and Quality Assurance for Natural Language Processing (SETQA-NLP 2009)}, year = {2009}, doi = {10.3115/1621947.1621955}, url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/1621947.1621955} } ``` - [← previous Exploring Middle English (mor-)phonotactics: the case of word-final /nd/](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/ritt-2019-exploring-middle-english-mor-phonotactics/) - [next → Une description morphologique structurée en arbre du verbe akkadien qui utilise des structures de traits et des transducteurs multirubans A Tree-Structured morphological description of the Akkadian verb which uses Feature Structures and Multi-tape Transducers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/barthelemy-2009-une-description-morphologique-structuree-en/) - [↑ back to papers of 2009](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2009/page/2/) ## References 6 references, 3 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet. 1. Stephen Boxwell and Michael White. 2008. Projecting Propbank roles onto the CCGbank. In Proc. LREC-08. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Stephen+Boxwell+and+Michael+White%2E+2008%2E+Projecting+Propbank+roles+onto+the+CCGbank%2E+In+Proc%2E+LREC%2D08%2E) 2. Michael Burke, Aoife Cahill, Mairead Mccarthy, Ruth O’Donovan, Josef Genabith, and Andy Way. 2004. Evaluating automatic LFG F-structure annotation for the Penn-II treebank. Research on Language and Computation, 2:523–547, December. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Michael+Burke%2C+Aoife+Cahill%2C+Mairead+Mccarthy%2C+Ruth+O%E2%80%99Donovan%2C+Josef+Genabith%2C+and+Andy+Way%2E+2004%2E+Evaluating+automatic+LFG+F%2Dstructure+annotation+for+the+Penn%2DII+treebank%2E+Research+on+Language+and+Co) 3. Dominic Espinosa, Michael White, and Dennis Mehay. 2008. Hypertagging: Supertagging for surface realization with CCG. In Proc. ACL-08: HLT. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Dominic+Espinosa%2C+Michael+White%2C+and+Dennis+Mehay%2E+2008%2E+Hypertagging%3A+Supertagging+for+surface+realization+with+CCG%2E+In+Proc%2E+ACL%2D08%3A+HLT%2E) 4. Julia Hockenmaier and Mark Steedman. 2007. [CCGbank: A Corpus of CCG Derivations and Dependency Structures Extracted from the Penn Treebank](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/hockenmaier-2007-ccgbank-corpus-ccg-derivations-dependency/). Computational Linguistics, 33(3):355–396. 5. Michael White and Rajakrishnan Rajkumar. 2008. [A more precise analysis of punctuation for broad-coverage surface realization with CCG](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/white-2008-more-precise-analysis-punctuation-broad/). In Proc. of the Workshop on Grammar Engineering Across Frameworks (GEAF08). 6. Michael White, Rajakrishnan Rajkumar, and Scott Martin. 2007. [Towards broad coverage surface realization with CCG](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/white-2007-broad-coverage-surface-realization-ccg/). In Proc. of the Workshop on Using Corpora for NLG: Language Generation and Machine Translation (UC-NLG+MT). *Updated 29 October 2026*