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Grammar

The Grammar layer is the rule system that turns structured meaning into well-formed text in a target language.

In SemantiK Architect, “grammar” covers two things: - Morphology (inflection): how words change form (agreement, conjugation, declension). - Syntax (structure + word order): how parts combine into phrases/clauses and how they are ordered.

This is the “rules” layer of the overall architecture: it defines morphology and syntax/word order, and it supports a hybrid approach that balances quality and coverage.

Why this layer exists

SemantiK Architect aims for: - Determinism (same input → same output), - Broad language coverage (including the long tail), - Reasonable grammatical quality even when a language lacks a full expert grammar.

The grammar layer is where those tradeoffs are managed: high precision when strong resources exist, and graceful degradation when they don’t.

The hybrid strategy (tiers)

SemantiK Architect uses a tiered approach to grammar resources:

  • Tier 1 (High Road): expert grammars For high-resource languages, use expert-grade grammar resources (GF/RGL-class) for richer morphology and more precise sentence realization.

  • Tier 2: manual / curated overrides When a community or project-maintained grammar exists, it can override both Tier 1 and Tier 3 for that language to improve naturalness and correctness.

  • Tier 3 (Factory): weighted-topology fallback For under-resourced languages, use a configuration-driven fallback based on weighted topology / dependency-role ordering. This exists to avoid “missing language” dead ends and ensure the system can still produce a grammatical-enough sentence.

See also: Language-Coverage-Strategy-Tiers

Grammar matrices and language cards

To scale efficiently, grammar knowledge is organized at two levels:

  • Family grammar matrices Reusable defaults shared across related languages (e.g., Romance, Slavic). They capture broad paradigm space and common patterns.

  • Language cards Language-specific overrides for quirks that shouldn’t live in the shared family matrix (e.g., special elision or clitic behavior).

This keeps the system modular: broad coverage from shared structure, with targeted exceptions where needed.

Relationship to other layers

  • Lexicon → Grammar The lexicon supplies lemmas and features (e.g., gender/number) that the grammar needs to inflect and agree.
    See: Lexicon

  • Grammar → Renderer The renderer selects a grammar strategy (tier) and uses it to realize a sentence plan into text.
    See: Renderer

  • Context ↔ Grammar Context can change what gets expressed (e.g., pronoun vs name); grammar ensures the chosen form fits correctly in the sentence.
    See: Context

What this page is (and is not)

This page explains what “Grammar” means in SemantiK Architect and how it supports coverage and quality.

It is not a build guide or an API reference. - Setup/build: Setup - API surface: API-Overview