8th GF Summer School 2023

GF Summer School logo

Tampere, Finland
14th – 25th August 2023

Please note that there is no scheduled program on August 19th and August 20th. There is a major rap and hip hop festival (Blockfest) on Friday 18th and Saturday 19th in Tampere, so if that's not your cup of tea, then you might want to consider tourism elsewhere in Finland those days. Accommodation will be much more expensive over that weekend in Tampere.

About

Grammatical Framework (GF) is a grammar formalism and a programming language for multilingual computational grammars. It is based on the idea of a shared abstract syntax and mappings between the abstract syntax and concrete languages. GF has hundreds of users all over the world.

The GF Resource Grammar Library (RGL) implements the morphology (inflection) and basic syntax (phrase structure) of more than 30 languages: Afrikaans, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Interlingua, Japanese, Italian, Latvian, Maltese, Mongolian, Nepali, Norwegian bokmål, Nynorsk, Persian, Polish, Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Sindhi, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, and Urdu. These resources are freely available as open-source software.

We are constantly welcoming new languages, especially from new language families. Learn more at the RGL status page. The summer school is an excellent place to get started with a new language.

The following Google TechTalk gives an overview of the GF technology and its many applications:

You will find the GF book a very good companion to your studies (available also as an e-book). However, the book is not a requirement for successful participation in the summer school.

Registration

Please register via this form. If the attendance stays on the normal level, then there is no need to limit the number of registrations. It is beneficial, though, that people register early.

There is no registration or participation fee. However the participants need to support their own travel and stay, including accommodation and meals.

At the moment, there is no information about grants/stipends to participants. Such information will be published if stipends become available.

Special themes

Temporality

The POLTE project at Tampere University studies the use of temporalities in political speech, and participates in organising the summer school

The POLTE project will present challenges to the summer school participants, related to temporalities in political speech.

Abstract Wikipedia

Our second theme is Abstract Wikipedia: an effort in multilingual natural language generation at a large scale, targeting a diverse set of languages and language families.

The special themes are present in two ways:

The summer school is pefectly suitable for a student who is interested in other aspects of grammar engineering.

Programme

Week 1 (August 14–18): Introduction to GF and multilingual grammar programming

Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday
9am–12pm: Lectures in class Aarne Ranta. A tour of the GF Ecosystem.
Inari Listenmaa. Tutorial: small grammars in GF binder.
TBA. Core linguistic constructions.
Tutorial: mini resource grammar.
TBA. Systematic overview of GF concepts.
Extended mini resource grammar.
TBA. Full resource grammar and its API.
WordNet in GF.
TBA. Design and implementation of application grammars.
Hands-on with an application grammar.
Lunch
1–5pm: Hands‑on in class Installing GF, building small grammars Starting mini resource in GF shell Work on projects / TBA Work on projects / TBA Participant presentations: plans for summer school projects

Weekend: Excursion TBA.

Week 2 (August 21-25): Advanced work in specialised tracks

Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday
9am–12pm: Lectures in class TBA. TBA
TBA. TBA TBA. TBA TBA. TBA Participant presentations: summer school projects
Lunch
1⁠–⁠4pm: Hands‑on in class TBA / Work on projects TBA / Work on projects TBA / Work on projects TBA / Work on projects Participant presentations

Teachers and invited speakers

Name Affiliation Topic
Aarne Ranta University of Gothenburg
Digital Grammars
GF tutorial;
various
Jyrki Nummenmaa Tampere University TBA
Inari Listenmaa Digital Grammars GF tutorial;
various
TBA - TBA

Venue

The summer school will take place in Tampere, at Tampere University.

Organizers

Computing Sciences Unit of Tampere University, and in particular the Tampere University NLP group will be in charge of the practical arrangements.

Contacts

The GF mailing list is a great place to ask about anything GF, including the summer school. If you have a more specific question, you can contact us directly:

Previous GF summer schools