Computational Issues in Fluid Construction Grammar A New Formali
This state-of-the-art-survey documents the Fluid Construction Grammar (FCG), a new formalism for the representation of lexicons and grammars, which has been used in a wide range of case studies for different languages, both for studying specific grammatic
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ICREA-Institut de Biologia Evolutiva (CSIC-UPF), Barcelona, Spain 2 Sony Computer Science Laboratory Paris, France
Abstract. The paper sketches a methodology for designing and implementing complex lexicons and grammars using Fluid Construction Grammar (FCG). FCG emphasizes a functional viewpoint of language and decomposes grammatical systems based on their semantic domains and communicative functions. Rather than directly specifying all the components of a construction explicitly, which would lead to highly complex definitions, FCG uses abstractions in the form of templates that implement design patterns common across human languages.
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Introduction
Fluid Construction Grammar (FCG) is a new formalization of many ideas that have been proposed in the recent literature on cognitive linguistics ([20, 21, 46]) and construction grammar ([8, 14, 15, 18, 26]). A construction is a regular pattern of usage in a language - such as a word, a combination of words, an idiom, or a syntactic pattern - which has a conventionalized meaning and function. For example, a resultative construction implies a particular syntactic pattern of the form: Subject Verb Direct-Object Predicate, as in "Mary licked her plate clean". It expresses that the referent of the Direct-Object ("her plate") gets into a particular state ("clean") based on the action described in the main verb ("licked") and carried out by the subject ("Mary"). A construction grammar catalogs the different constructions in a language, both their semantic (including pragmatic) aspects and their syntactic (including morphological and phonetic) aspects. Although construction grammars are usually described only in verbal terms, particularly when the grammar is intended for second language learning or teaching, it is entirely possible to formalize and operationalize construction grammar in order to model human natural language processing. Such an implementation has the advantage of making it clear what a construction entails, and it makes the use of construction grammars in computational applications possible. Formalizations of construction grammar differ from generative rewrite grammars in two ways: 1. The definition of constructions takes the form of bi-directional associations relating aspects of meaning to aspects of form, so that the same construction can be used unchanged in parsing as well as production without compromising efficiency. Production here entails more than randomly generating a L. Steels (Ed.): Computational Issues in FCG, LNAI 7249, pp. 3–36, 2012. c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012
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L. Steels
possible sentence. It is the process whereby the meaning resulting from conceptualization is turned into the best possible sentence respecting as much as possible known conventions of the language. 2. The bi-directional associations potentially have to take into consideration aspects from all levels of language (pragmatics, semantics, syntax, morphology and phonetics), simply because human language is not modularly organized. For example, Hungarian (poly-person
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