Gramble: A Tabular Programming Language for Collaborative Linguistic Modeling (2024)

Abstract: We introduce Gramble, a domain-specific programming language for linguistic parsing and generation, in the tradition of XFST, TWOLC, and Kleene. Gramble features an intuitive tabular syntax and supports live group programming, allowing community experts to participate more directly in system development without having to be programmers themselves. A cross-platform interpreter is available for Windows, MacOS, and UNIX, supports collaborative programming on the web via Google Sheets, and is released open-source under the MIT license.

## }] moving the tape names to column headers, and handling separation and hierarchy spatially, removes much of the error-prone boilerplate involved in expressing tabular information as plain text. even if the lexc code above were clarified with a syntax highlighter 12 , the requirement that field names be specified in each flag, and (for bidirectional fsts) that flags need to be repeated for each tape, means that each line above requires 38 added characters just to express 3 characters' worth of information.