ACGtk: A Toolkit for Developing and Running Abstract Categorial Grammars

The Abstract categorial grammars (ACGs) is an expressive grammatical framework whose formal properties have been extensively studied. While it can provide its own account, as a grammar, of linguistic phenomena, it is known to encode several grammatical formalisms, including context-free grammars, but also mildly context-sensitive formalisms such as tree-adjoining grammars or m-linear context-free rewriting systems for which parsing is polynomial. The ACG toolkit we present provides a compiler, acgc, that checks and turns ACGs into representations that are suitable for testing and parsing, used in the acg interpreter. We illustrate these functionalities and discuss implementation features, in particular the Datalog reduction on which parsing is based, and the magic set rewriting techniques that can further be applied.