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A (very) Brief Introduction to Fluid Construction Grammar

Summary

The authors present Fluid Construction Grammar (FCG), a new formalism for construction grammar. It was created to test whether this approach can support open-ended dialogue between autonomous embodied agents, in particular robots, about the world they perceive through their sensors. The goal is a language system that can use established conventions and also invent and acquire new ones when the need arises. FCG continues the tradition of unification-based grammars over feature structures, above all HPSG. At the same time, each utterance in FCG is described by two parallel structures, a semantic one and a syntactic one, which are linked by shared unit names. Meaning is understood procedurally: it is a network of constraints that the listener executes as a program. All rules work in both directions, that is, for both production and parsing, through the operations Unify and Merge. The engine is implemented in LISP and is already operational. It was used in experiments with Sony AIBO robots, in which populations of agents arrived from scratch at a shared communication system, so far for simple forms of language. The work shows how parsing, production and language learning can be combined within a single computational framework.

Key points

  • FCG has been under development since about 2001, and the LISP implementation was released in 2005 through the VUB AI Lab website. The authors openly acknowledge that many technical issues remain unresolved.
  • A syntactic unit has three features: syn-subunits, syn-cat, form. A semantic unit has four: sem-subunits, sem-cat, meaning, context. The hierarchy is specified explicitly through these features rather than by nesting units. All categories are open-ended and language-specific, as in Croft's radical construction grammar.
  • Meaning is written in the constraint language IRL (Incremental Recruitment Language). For example, for "the box" it is a chain of the primitives equal-to-context, filter-set-prototype and select-element. The same constraints work both during interpretation and during conceptualization.
  • Rules are divided into types: morph-rules, lex-stem-rules, con-rules, sem- and syn-rules. They are applied in different orders during production and during parsing. SVOL is analyzed as an example of a grammatical construction.
  • Language acquisition is modeled through language games. The speaker has a meta-level architecture with reflection for repairing utterances and checks itself by parsing its own phrase. Rule scores increase after success and decrease after failure, and competing rules are inhibited (lateral inhibition).

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Cite

Cite as Luc Steels and Joachim de Beule. 2006. A (very) Brief Introduction to Fluid Construction Grammar. Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Scalable Natural Language Understanding.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{steels2006very,
  title = {{A (very) Brief Introduction to Fluid Construction Grammar}},
  author = {Luc Steels and Joachim {de Beule}},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Scalable Natural Language Understanding},
  year = {2006},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/W06-3510/}
}

References

19 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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  3. Croft, William A. (2001). Radical Construction Grammar; Syntactic Theory in Typological Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press. find
  4. De Beule, J. and L. Steels (2005) Hierarchy in Fluid Construction Grammar. In: Furbach, U. (eds) (2005) Proceedings of KI-2005. Lecture Notes in AI 3698. Springer-Verlag, Berlin. p.1-15. find
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  14. Steels, L. (2004) Constructivist Development of Grounded Construction Grammars. In D. Scott, W. Daelemans and M. Walker (Eds.), Proceedings Annual Meeting of Association for Computational Linguistics Conference. Barcelona: ACL , (pp. 9-16). find
  15. Steels, L. and J. De Beule (2006) Unify and Merge in FCG. In: Vogt, P. et.al. (eds.) Proceedings of EELC III. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer-Verlag, Berlin. find
  16. Steels, L. and J. Bleys (2005) Planning What To Say: Second Order Semantics for Fluid Construction Grammars. In: Proceedings of CAEPIA 2005. Santiago de Compostella. find
  17. Steels, L. and M. Loetzsch (2006) Perspective Alignment in Spatial Language. In: Coventry, K., J. Bateman and T. Tenbrink (2006) Spatial Language in Dialogue. Oxford University Press. Oxford. find
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