We present an implementation of the notion of modularity and composition applied to unification based grammars. Monolithic unification grammars can be decomposed into sub-grammars with well defined interfaces. Sub-grammars are applied in a sequential manner at runtime, allowing incremental development and testing of large coverage grammars. The modular approach to grammar development leads us away from the traditional view of parsing a string of input symbols as the recognition of some start symbol, and towards a richer and more flexible view where inputs and outputs share the same structural properties.

The Computing Research Laboratory is currently developing technologies that allow rapid deployment of automatic translation capabilities. These technologies are designed to handle low-density languages for which resources, be that human informants or data in electronically readable form, are scarce. All tools are built in an incremental fashion, such that some simple tools (a bilingual dictionary or a glosser) can be delivered early in the development to support initial analysis tasks. More complex applications can be fielded in successive functional versions. The technology we demonstrate has first been applied to Persian-English machine translation within the Shiraz project and is currently extended to cover languages such as Arabic, Japanese, Korean and others.