Are there any scientific challenges?

The first challenge is to scale up the size of applications. Not so much the number of languages, which we know how to manage already, but the lexicon size - from hundreds to thousands of words. We need techniques to build manually and extract automatically such translation lexica. This leads to the second challange, which is to minimize the development effort, in terms of skills and time: to make GF available for people with no special training, as a part of their normar work flows. This needs both new algorithms and interaction design. The third challenge is to exploit the use of ontologies in the semantic web to boot-strap GF abstract syntax; the goal is to enable an automatic conversion from OWL to GF. We also want to enable multilingual queries of ontological databases by using MOLTO translation. The fourth challenge is to combine GF with statistical machine translation (SMT), both to improve the robustness of translation and to extract grammars from text.