Grammars are of interest to both linguists and engineers. They are a formal way of writing down how a language works.

• For linguists, the goal is to write down the true grammar of the language -- the one that is subconsciously used by the language's speakers.
• For engineers, the goal is to apply the grammar to some task. This requires algorithms that make use of grammars: for example, generation and parsing of sentences.

In this lab, students worked in a team to design a grammar for as much of English as possible. Nowadays it is fashionable to construct grammars somewhat automatically. But by building one the old-fashioned manual way, they had to grapple directly with linguistic phenomena, grammars, and probabilities.

The following files associated with this lab are available:

• Lab Page