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Constraint Grammar

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Constraint

Grammar

General [to top]

Constraint Grammar (CG) parsers are at the core of most of VISL's live applications. The Constraint Grammar concept was launched by Fred Karlsson in the early 90'ies (Karlsson et.al.1995), and CG parsers have since been written for a large variety of languages, routinely achieving F-scores for PoS (word class) of over 99%. A number of syntactic CG systems have reported F-scores of around 95%. VISL's own Constraint Grammar systems are inspired by Eckhard Bick's PALAVRAS parser for Portuguese (Bick 2000), and use, as a novelty, subclause function, generalized dependency markers and semantic prototype tags. For most languages, a lexicon based morphological analyzer provides input to the first CG level, while the output of the last CG-level can be converted into syntactic tree structures by specially designed Phrase Structure Grammars (PSG's), using syntactic functions, not words, as terminals. Other, hybrid combinations are, however, feasible. Thus, the French system uses PoS information from a probabilistic tagger.

Constraint Grammar (CG) is a methodological paradigm for Natural Language Parsing (NLP). Linguist-written, context dependent rules are compiled into a grammar that assigns grammatical tags ("readings") to words or other tokens in running text. Typical tags address lemmatisation (lexeme or base form), inflexion, derivation, syntactic function, dependency, valency, case roles, semantic type etc. Each rule either adds, removes, selects or replaces a tag or a set of grammatical tags in a given sentence context. Context conditions can be linked to any tag or tag set of any word anywhere in the sentence, either locally (defined distances) or globally (undefined disances). Context conditions in the same rule may be linked, i.e. conditioned upon each other, negated or blocked by interfering words or tags. Typical CG's consist of thousands of rules, that are applied set-wise in progressive steps, covering ever more advanced levels of analysis. Within each level, safe rules are used before heuristic rules, and no rule is allowed to remove the last reading of a given kind, thus providing for a hight degree of robustness.

Publications [to top]

[early CG-publications] [VISL CG-publications] [other CG-publications]

Early general Constraint Grammar publications

  • Karlsson, Fred (1990). "Constraint grammar as a framework for parsing running text". In: Karlgren, Hans (ed.), Proceedings of 13th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, volume 3, pp. 168-173, Helsinki, Finland.
  • Karlsson et al. (1995), "Constraint Grammar - A Language-Independent System for Parsing Unrestricted Text". Mouton de Gruyter
  • Chanod, Jean-Pierre and Pasi Tapanainen (1995). "Tagging French – comparing a statistical and a constraint-based method." In: Proceedings of the Seventh Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 149–156, Dublin, Ireland, March. ACL.
  • Tapanainen, Pasi (1996). "The Constraint Grammar Parser CG-2". No 27, Publications of the Department of General Linguistics, University of Helsinki.

Some publications concerning VISL Constraint Grammar systems:

  • Bick, Eckhard (2015). DanProof: Pedagogical Spell and Grammar Checking for Danish. In: Galia Angelova, Kalina Bontcheva & Ruslan Mitkov: Proceedings of RANLP 2015 (Hissar, Bulgaria, 7-9 Sept. 2015). pp. 55-62. ISSN 1313-8502, ISBN 781510813281
  • Bick, Eckhard & Kristin Hagen & Anders Nøklestad (2015). Optimizing the Oslo-Bergen Tagger. In: Eckhard Bick & Kristin Hagen: Proceedings of Constraint Grammar - Methods, Tools and Applications (Workshop at NODALIDA 2015, May 11, 2015, Vilnius), Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings, No. 113. pp. 11-19. Linköping: LiU Electronic Press. ISBN 978-91-7519-037-2
  • Bick, Eckhard & Tino Didriksen (2015). CG-3 - Beyond Classical Constraint Grammar. In: Beáta Megyesi: Proceedings of NODALIDA 2015, May 11-13, 2015, Vilnius, Lithuania. pp. 31-39. Linköping: LiU Electronic Press. ISBN 978-91-7519-098-3
  • Bick, Eckhard & Anabela Barreiro (2015). Automatic Anonymisation of a new Portuguese-English Parallel Corpus in the Legal-Financial Domain. In: Alberto Simões, Anabela Barreiro, Diana Santos, Rui Sousa-Silva & Stella E.O. Tagnin (eds.), Linguística, Informática e Tradução: Mundos que se Cruzam. Oslo Studies in Language, Vol. 7, No 1 (2015). pp. 101-122. ISBN 978-82-91398-12-9, ISSN 1890-9639
  • Bick, Eckhard (2014). Translating the Swedish Wikipedia into Danish. In: Accepted Abstracts of The 5th Swedish Language Technology Conference. SLTC 2014, Uppsala University, 13-14 Nov 2014
  • Bick, Eckhard (2014). Swedish-Danish Machine Translation in a Constraint Grammar Framework. In: Adam Przepiórkowski & Maciej Ogrodniczuk (eds.), Advances in Natural Language Processing, Proceedings of 9th International Conference on NLP, PolTAL 2014, Warsaw, Poland, September 17-19, 2014, pp. 216-227. Heidelberg:Springer. ISBN 978-3-319-10887-2
  • Bick, Eckhard (2014), ML-Optimization of Ported Constraint Grammars, In: Calzolari, Nicoletta et al. (eds.), Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC2014 (Reykjavik, May 28-30, 2014). pp. 3382-3386. ISBN 978-2-9517408-8-4
  • Bick, Eckhard (2014). PALAVRAS, a Constraint Grammar-based Parsing System for Portuguese. In: Tony Berber Sardinha & Thelma de Lurdes São Bento Ferreira (eds.), Working with Portuguese Corpora, pp 279-302. London/New York:Bloomsburry Academic. ISBN 978-1-4411-9050-5
  • Bick, Eckhard (2013), ML-Tuned Constraint Grammars, In: Proceedings of the 27th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, pp. 440-449. Taipei: Department of English, National Chengchi University. ISBN 978-986-03-8567-0
  • Bick, Eckhard (2013). Using Constraint Grammar for Chunking. In: S. Oepen, K. Hagen & J. B. Joannessen (Eds), Proceedings of the 19th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics (NODALIDA 2013), May 22-24, Oslo, Norway. Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings Vol. 85, pp. 13-26. Linköping: Linköping University Electronic Press. (ISSN 1650-3740, ISBN 978-91-7519-589-6)
  • Bick, Eckhard (2013), Parsing Speech Data: The Automatic Grammatical Annotation of the C-ORAL-Brasil Corpus, In: Proceedings of GSCP 2012 (Belo Horizonte, February 29 - March 2, 2012). Firenze: Firenze University Press (Permalink: http://digital.casalini.it/9788866553519), pp. 27-32. ISBN 978-88-665-5351-9
  • Bick, Eckhard (2012). A anotação gramatical do C-ORAL Brasil. In: Tommaso Raso & Heliana Mello (eds), C-ORAL-Brasil I - Corpus de referência do português brasileiro falado informal. Chapter 6, pp 223-254. Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG. ISBN 978-85-7041-943-9
  • Bick, Eckhard (2011), A Barebones Constraint Grammar, In: Helena Hong Gao & Minghui Dong (eds), Proceedings of the 25th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation (Singapore, 16-18 December, 2011). pp. 226-235, ISBN 978-4-905166-02-3
  • Bick, Eckhard (2011). WikiTrans, The English Wikipedia in Esperanto. In: Constraint Grammar Applications, Workshop at NODALIDA 2011, Riga, Latvia. (forthcoming: NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 14, pp. 8-16. Tartu: Tartu University Library. ISSN 1736-6305)
  • Bick, Eckhard (2010), Degrees of Orality in Speech-like Corpora: Comparative Annotation of Chat and E-mail Corpora, In: Ryo Otoguru et al. (eds.), Proceedings of the 24th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation (Tohoku University, 4-7 November, 2010). pp. 721-729, ISBN 978-4-905166-00-9
  • Bick, Eckhard (2010), FrAG, a Hybrid Constraint Grammar Parser for French, In: Calzolari, Nicoletta et al. (eds.), Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC2010 (Malta, May 19-21, 2010). pp. xxx (ISBN 2-9517408-6-7)
  • Bick, Eckhard (2010), A Dependency-based Approach to Anaphora Annotation, in: (eds.) Extended Activities Proceedings, 9th International Conference on Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language Apr. 27-30. Porto Alegre, Brazil. pp. xxx. ISSN 2177-3580(original version, full length)
  • Valverde, Pilar & Bick, Eckhard (2010). "A Web Corpus of Spanish Automatically Annotated with Semantic Roles". In: Sánchez, A. & M. Almela. 2010. A Mosaic of Corpus Linguistics. Selected Approaches. Berlin/Frankfurt: Peter Lang. [Oral presentation at: 1st International Conerence on Corpus Linguistics (CILC-09), Murcia May 7-9 2009] (ISBN 978-3-631-58789-8. ISSN 1436-1914)
  • Bick, Eckhard (2009). A Dependency Constraint Grammar for Esperanto. Constraint Grammar Workshop at NODALIDA 2009, Odense. NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol 8, pp.8-12. Tartu: Tartu University Library. (ISSN 1736-6305)
  • Bick, Eckhard (2009). Introducing probabilistic information in Constraint Grammar parsing. Proceedings of Corpus Linguistics 2009, Liverpool, UK. Electronically published at ... (forthcoming)
  • Bick, Eckhard & Valverde, Pilar (2009). Automatic Semantic Role Annotation for Spanish. Proceedings of NODALIDA 2009. NEALT Proceedings Series Vol. 4. pp. 215-218. Tartu: Tartu University Library. ISSN 1736-6305
  • Bick, Eckhard (2007). Automatic Semantic Role Annotation for Portuguese. In: Proceedings of TIL 2007 - 5th Workshop on Information and Human Language Technology / Anais do XXVII Congresso da SBC (Rio de Janeiro, July 5-6, 2007). ISBN 85-7669-116-7, pp. 1713-1716 (unabridged version)
  • Bick, Eckhard (2007), "Functional Aspects in Portuguese NER". In: Diana Santos & Nuno Cardoso (eds.), Reconhecimento de entidades mencionadas em português: Documentação e actas do HAREM, a primeira avaliação conjunta na área.. pp. 145-155 (reprint of 2006-2) ISBN: 978-989-20-0731-1.
  • Bick, Eckhard (2007), Dan2eng: Wide-Coverage Danish-English Machine Translation, In: Bente Maegaard (ed.), Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XI, 10-14. Sept. 2007, Copenhagen, Denmark. pp. 37-43
  • Bick, Eckhard (2007), Tagging and Parsing an Artificial Language: An Annotated Web-Corpus of Esperanto, In: Proceedings of Corpus Linguistics 2007, Birmingham, UK. Electronically published at (http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/publications/CL2007/, Nov. 2007)
  • Bick, Eckhard & Nygaard, Lars (2007). Using Danish as a CG Interlingua. A Wide-Coverage Norwegian-English Machine Translation System. In: Proceedings of the 16th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics. Tartu, Estonia. ISBN978-9985-4-0514-7
  • Bick, Eckhard (2006), Noun Sense Tagging: Semantic Prototype Annotation of a Portuguese Treebank, In: Hajic, Jan & Nivre, Joakim (red.), Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories (December 1-2, 2006, Prague, Czech Republic), pp.127-138
  • Bick, Eckhard (2006), A Constraint Grammar-Based Parser for Spanish. In: Proceedings of TIL 2006 - 4th Workshop on Information and Human Language Technology (Ribeirão Preto, October 27-28, 2006).
  • Bick, Eckhard (2006), "Functional Aspects in Portuguese NER", in: Renata Vieira et al. (eds.) Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language (Proceedings of PROPOR 2006, Itatiaia, May 15th-17th, 2006), pp.80-89. Springer
  • Bick, Eckhard (2006), "A Constraint Grammar Based Spellchecker for Danish with a Special Focus on Dyslexics". In: Suominen, Mickael et.al. (ed.) A Man of Measure: Festschrift in Honour of Fred Karlsson on his 60th Birthday. Special Supplement to SKY Jounal of Linguistics, Vol. 19 (ISSN 1796-279X), pp. 387-396. Turku: The Linguistic Association of Finland
  • Bick, Eckhard (2005), Turning Constraint Grammar Data into Running Dependency Treebanks, In: Civit, Montserrat & Kübler, Sandra & Martí, Ma. Antònia (red.), Proceedings of TLT 2005 (4th Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theory, Barcelona, December 9th - 10th, 2005), pp.19-27
  • Bick, Eckhard (2005), Gramática Constritiva na Análise Automática de Sintaxe Portuguesa. In: Berber Sardinha, Tony (ed.), A Língua Portuguesa no Computador [The Portuguese Language on the Computer]. Campinas: Mercado de Letras, São Paulo: FAPESP. ISBN: 85-7591-044-2
  • Bick, Eckhard (2004), PaNoLa: Integrating Constraint Grammar and CALL, In: Henrik Holmboe (red.), Nordic Language Technology, Årbog for Nordisk Sprogteknologisk Forskningsprogram 2000-2004 (Yearbook 2003). p.183-190, Copenhaguen: Museum Tusculanum
  • Bick, Eckhard (2004), Parsing and evaluating the French Europarl corpus, In: Patrick Paroubek, Isabelle Robba & Anne Vilnat (red.): Méthodes et outils pour lévaluation des analyseurs syntaxiques (Journée ATALA, May 15, 2004). pp. 4-9. Paris: ATALA.
  • Bick, Eckhard (2003). "A Constraint Grammar Based Question-Answering System for Portuguese". In: Fernando Moura Pires & Salvador (eds.) Progress in Artificial Intelligence (Proceedings of EPIA'2003, Beja, Dec. 2003), pp. 414-418. Springer
  • Bick, Eckhard (2003), A CG & PSG Hybrid Approach to Automatic Corpus Annotation, in Kiril Simow & Petya Osenova: Proceedings of SProLaC2003 (at Corpus Linguistics 2003, Lancaster), pp. 1-12
  • Bick, Eckhard (2001), En Constraint Grammar Parser for Dansk, in Peter Widell & Mette Kunøe (eds.) 8. Møde om Udforskningen af Dansk Sprog, 12.-13. oktober 2000, pp. 40-50, Århus University
  • Bick, Eckhard (2000), The Parsing System Palavras - Automatic Grammatical Analysis of Portuguese in a Constraint Grammar Famework, Aarhus: Aarhus University Press (preprint version) -- dr.phil. thesis (cf. the Disputatio for an introduction)
  • Bick, Eckhard (1998), Tagging Speech Data - Constraint Grammar Analysis of Spoken Portuguese, in: Proceedings of the 17th Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics, (Odense 1998)
  • Bick, Eckhard (1996), Automatic Parsing of Portuguese. In García, Laura Sánchez (ed.), Anais / II Encontro para o Processamento Computacional de Português Escrito e Falado. Curitiba: CEFET-PR.

Other publications concerning Constraint Grammar

  • Antonsen, Lene & Huhmarniemi, Saara & Trosterud, Trond (2009). Constraint Grammar in Dialogue systems. Constraint Grammar Workshop at NODALIDA 2009, Odense. NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol 8, pp.13-21. Tartu: Tartu University Library. (ISSN 1736-6305)
  • Antonsen, Lene & Huhmarniemi, Saara & Trosterud, Trond (2009). Interactive pedagogical programs based on Constraint Grammar. Constraint Grammar Workshop at NODALIDA 2009, Odense. NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol 8, pp.10-17. Tartu: Tartu University Library. (ISSN 1736-6305)
  • Lindström, Liina & Müürisep, Kaili (2009). Parsing Corpus of Estonian Dialects. Constraint Grammar Workshop at NODALIDA 2009, Odense. NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol 8, pp. 22-29. Tartu: Tartu University Library. (ISSN 1736-6305)
  • Trosterud, Trond (2009). A Constraint Grammar for Faroese. Constraint Grammar Workshop at NODALIDA 2009, Odense. NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol 8, pp.1-7. Tartu: Tartu University Library. (ISSN 1736-6305)
  • Dhonnchadha, E. Uí (2006). "A Part-of-speech tagger for Irish using Finite-State Morphology and Constraint Grammar Disambiguation". In: Proceedings of LREC'06. Genova, Italy.
  • Atserias, J. et al. (2006). "FreeLing 1.3: Syntactic and semantic services in an open-source NLP library". In: Proceedings of LREC'06. Genoa, Italy (2006)
  • Hurskainen, Arvi (2006), Constraint Grammar in Unconventional Use: Handling complex Swahili idioms and proverbs. In: Suominen, Mickael et.al. (ed.) A Man of Measure: Festschrift in Honour of Fred Karlsson on his 60th Birthday. Special Supplement to SKY Jounal of Linguistics, Vol. 19 (ISSN 1796-279X), pp. 397-406. Turku: The Linguistic Association of Finland
  • Müürisep, Kaili and Uibo, Heli. "Shallow Parsing of Spoken Estonian Using Constraint Grammar". In: P.J.Henriksen & P.R.Skadhauge, Proceedings of NODALIDA-2005 special session on treebanking. Copenhagen Studies in Language #33/2006.
  • Müürisep, Kaili et al. (2003). A New Language for Constraint Grammar: Estonian. In: International Conference Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing. Proceedings. Borovets, Bulgaria, 10-12 September 2003, pp. 304-310.
  • Hagen, Kristin & Lane, Pia. & Trosterud, Trond (2001). "En grammatikkontrol for bokmål". In: Kjell Ivar Vannebo & Helge Sandøy (eds.): Språkknyt 3-2001.
  • Hagen, K., Johannessen, J. B., Nøklestad, A.(2000). "A Constraint-Based Tagger for Norwegian". In: Lindberg, C.-E. og Lund, S.N. (red.): 17th Scandinavian Conference of Linguistic, Odense. Odense Working Papers in Language and Communication, No. 19, vol I.
  • Arppe, Antti (2000). "Developing a grammar checker for Swedish". In: Nordgård, T. (ed.) Nodalida'99 Proceedings. Department of Linguistics, University of Trondheim. pp. 13-27.
  • Birn, Jussi (2000). "Detecting grammar errors with Lingsoft's Swedish grammar checker". In: Nordgård, T. (ed.) Nodalida'99 Proceedings. Department of Linguistics, University of Trondheim. pp. 28-40.
  • Lager, Torbjörn (1999). "The µ-TBL System: Logic Programming Tools for Transformation-Based Learning". In: Proceedings of CoNLL'99, Bergen.
  • Lindberg, Nikolaj & Martin Eineborg (1998). "Learning Constraint Grammar-style disambiguation rules using Inductive Logic Programming". In: Proceedings of COLING 1998.
  • Lindberg, Nikolaj & Martin Eineborg (1998). "Learning Constraint Grammar-style disambiguation rules using Progol". In: Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1998, Volume 1446/1998, 116-124, DOI: 10.1007/BFb0027315
  • Padró, L.(1996). "POS Tagging Using Relaxation Labelling". In: Proceedings of COLING '96. Copenhagen, Denmark.
  • Hurskainen, Arvi (1996). "Disambiguation of morphological analysis in Bantu languages". In: Proceedings of the 16th conference on Computational Linguistics. Copenhagen:ACL. Vol.1, pp.568-573
  • Marques, Lluis & Horacio Rodriguez (1995). "Towards Learning a Constraint Grammar from Annotated Corpora Using Decision Trees". ESPRIT BRA-. 7315 Acquilex II, Working Paper
  • Chanod, Jean-Pierre & Tapanainen, Pasi, "Tagging French - comparing a statistical and a constraint- based method", adapted from: Statistical and Constraint- based Taggers for French, Technical report MLTT-016, Rank Xerox Research Centre, Grenoble, 1994
  • Voutilainen, Atro, Juha Heikkilä, and Arto Anttila (1992). "Constraint Grammar of English - A Performance-Oriented Introduction". No. 21, Publications of the Department of General Linguistics, University of Helsinki.
 

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