Grammar Engineering is the task of designing and implementing linguistically motivated electronic descriptions of natural language (so-called grammars). These grammars are expressed within well-defined theoretical frameworks, and offer a fine-grained description of natural language. While grammars were first used to describe syntax, that is to say, the relations between constituents in a sentence, they often go beyond syntax and include semantic information. Grammar engineering provides precise descriptions which can be used for natural language understanding and generation, making these valuable resources for various natural language applications, including textual entailment, dialogue systems, or machine translation. The first attempts at designing large-scale resource grammars were costly because of the complexity of the task (Erbach et al. 1990) and of the number of persons that were needed (see e.g. Doran et al. 1997). Advances in the field have led to the development of environments for semi-automatic grammar engineering, borrowing ideas from compilation (grammar engineering is compared with software development) and machine learning. This special issue reports on new trends in the field, where grammar engineering benefits from elaborate high-level methodologies and techniques, dealing with various issues (both theoretical and practical).
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机译：语法工程是设计和实现语言动机的自然语言电子描述（所谓的语法）的任务。这些语法在定义明确的理论框架内表达，并提供对自然语言的细粒度描述。虽然语法最初是用来描述语法的，也就是说，句子中成分之间的关系，但是它们通常不仅仅包含语法，还包括语义信息。语法工程提供了可用于自然语言理解和生成的精确描述，使这些宝贵的资源可用于各种自然语言应用程序，包括文本限定，对话系统或机器翻译。由于任务的复杂性（Erbach et al。1990）和所需人员的数量（例如见Doran et al。1997），设计大规模资源语法的第一次尝试是昂贵的。该领域的进步导致开发了半自动语法工程的环境，借鉴了编译的思想（将语法工程与软件开发进行了比较）和机器学习。本期专刊报道了该领域的新趋势，其中语法工程从复杂的高级方法和技术中受益，涉及各种问题（理论和实践）。
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