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Fluid Construction Grammar: The New Kid on the Block

Summary

This is a demonstration paper on Fluid Construction Grammar (FCG). FCG is a formalism that gives cognitive linguistics and construction grammar a precise computational foundation. The authors explain why classical unification-based tools, built into generative theories such as HPSG, are poorly suited to this purpose. Such tools draw a rigid distinction between competence and performance and have a fixed system of feature types. FCG is open-source software that has been developed for more than ten years. A single core with a single set of constructions performs both parsing and production. Each construction has a semantic pole and a syntactic pole. Its application consists of a matching phase and two merging phases, and the direction depends on the task. The paper also describes how the very form in which a grammar is written affects its processing, a template level for grammar design, and a web interface for inspection. The authors deliberately abandoned typed features for the sake of flexibility. Robustness is provided by a meta-level of diagnostics and repairs. The paper contains no quantitative evaluation. Its value lies in providing a working tool for modelling usage-based approaches and for studying the relationship between grammar and processing efficiency.

Key points

  • Parsing and production run on a shared core and a shared inventory of constructions. In LKB, separate algorithms are used for this, and the generator there covers fewer structures than the parser.
  • The application of a construction has three phases. The first is matching: a check stricter than unification, close to subsumption. The second is the merging of marked feature–value pairs. The third is the merging of the opposite pole.
  • FCG has no typed feature structures. Protection against overlicensing of structures is provided by the matching phase, and generalization is ensured by design level templates.
  • The meta-level (Beuls et al., 2012) detects and repairs failures of routine processing, including missing lexical items and coercion.
  • For efficiency, FCG offers dependency networks between constructions, chunking of ready-made phrases, and feature matrices for the German case system. For polysemy in spatial language, actual and potential meanings are distinguished. The system is available at www.fcg-net.org.

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 Remi van Trijp, Luc Steels, Katrien Beuls and Pieter Wellens. 2012. Fluid Construction Grammar: The New Kid on the Block. Proceedings of the Demonstrations at the 13th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

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

@inproceedings{trijp2012fluid,
  title = {{Fluid Construction Grammar: The New Kid on the Block}},
  author = {Remi {van Trijp}, Luc Steels, Katrien Beuls and Pieter Wellens},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Demonstrations at the 13th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics},
  year = {2012},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/E12-2013/}
}

References

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