There is a growing awareness of the significance and value that modelling using information technology can bring to the functionally oriented linguistic enterprise. This encompasses a spectrum of areas as diverse as concept modelling, language processing and grammar modelling, conversational agents, and the visualisation of complex linguistic information in a functional linguistic perspective. This edited volume offers a collection of papers dealing with different aspects of computational modelling of language and grammars, within a functional perspective at both the theoretical and application levels. As a result, this volume represents the first instance of contemporary functionally oriented computational treatments of a variety of important language and linguistic issues. This book presents current research on functionally oriented computational models of grammar, language processing and linguistics, concerned with a broadly functional computational linguistics that also contributes to our understanding of languages within a functional and cognitive linguistic, computational research agenda.

Finite-state devices, such as finite-state automata, graphs, and finite-state transducers, have been present since the emergence of computer science and are extensively used in areas as various as program compilation, hardware modeling, and database management. Although finite-state devices have been known for some time in computational linguistics, more powerful formalisms such as context-free grammars or unification grammars have typically been preferred. Recent mathematical and algorithmic results in the field of finite-state technology have had a great impact on the representation of electronic dictionaries and on natural language processing, resulting in a new technology for language emerging out of both industrial and academic research. This book presents a discussion of fundamental finite-state algorithms, and constitutes an approach from the perspective of natural language processing.

Studies of language acqUiSItion have largely ignored processing prin ciples and mechanisms. Not surprisingly, questions concerning the analysis of an informative linguistic input - the potential evidence for grammatical parameter setting - have also been ignored. Especially in linguistic approaches to language acquisition, the role of language processing has not been prominent. With few exceptions (e. g. Goodluck and Tavakolian, 1982; Pinker, 1984) discussions of language perform ance tend to arise only when experimental debris, the artifact of some experiment, needs to be cleared away. Consequently, language pro cessing has been viewed as a collection of rather uninteresting perform ance factors obscuring the true object of interest, namely, grammar acquisition. On those occasions when parsing "strategies" have been incorporated into accounts of language development, they have often been discussed as vague preferences, not open to rigorous analysis. In principle, however, theories of language comprehension can and should be subjected to the same criteria of explicitness and explanatoriness as other theories, e. g. , theories of grammar. Thus their peripheral role in accounts of language development may reflect accidental factors, rather than any inherent fuzziness or irrelevance to the language acquisition problem. It seems probable that an explicit model of the way(s) processing routines are applied in acquisition would help solve some central problems of grammar acquisition, since these routines regulate the application of grammatical knowledge to novel inputs.

Investigations into employing statistical approaches with linguistically motivated representations and its impact on Natural Language processing tasks. The last decade has seen computational implementations of large hand-crafted natural language grammars in formal frameworks such as Tree-Adjoining Grammar (TAG), Combinatory Categorical Grammar (CCG), Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), and Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG). Grammars in these frameworks typically associate linguistically motivated rich descriptions (Supertags) with words. With the availability of parse-annotated corpora, grammars in the TAG and CCG frameworks have also been automatically extracted while maintaining the linguistic relevance of the extracted Supertags. In these frameworks, Supertags are designed so that complex linguistic constraints are localized to operate within the domain of those descriptions. While this localization increases local ambiguity, the process of disambiguation (Supertagging) provides a unique way of combining linguistic and statistical information. This volume investigates the theme of employing statistical approaches with linguistically motivated representations and its impact on Natural Language Processing tasks. In particular, the contributors describe research in which words are associated with Supertags that are the primitives of different grammar formalisms including Lexicalized Tree-Adjoining Grammar (LTAG). Contributors Jens Bäcker, Srinivas Bangalore, Akshar Bharati, Pierre Boullier, Tomas By, John Chen, Stephen Clark, Berthold Crysmann, James R. Curran, Kilian Foth, Robert Frank, Karin Harbusch, Sasa Hasan, Aravind Joshi, Vincenzo Lombardo, Takuya Matsuzaki, Alessandro Mazzei, Wolfgang Menzel, Yusuke Miyao, Richard Moot, Alexis Nasr, Günter Neumann, Martha Palmer, Owen Rambow, Rajeev Sangal, Anoop Sarkar, Giorgio Satta, Libin Shen, Patrick Sturt, Jun'ichi Tsujii, K. Vijay-Shanker, Wen Wang, Fei Xia

This comprehensive reference work provides an overview of the concepts, methodologies, and applications in computational linguistics and natural language processing (NLP). Features contributions by the top researchers in the field, reflecting the work that is driving the discipline forward Includes an introduction to the major theoretical issues in these fields, as well as the central engineering applications that the work has produced Presents the major developments in an accessible way, explaining the close connection between scientific understanding of the computational properties of natural language and the creation of effective language technologies Serves as an invaluable state-of-the-art reference source for computational linguists and software engineers developing NLP applications in industrial research and development labs of software companies

A nontechnical introduction to complexity theory: its strengths, its weaknesses, and how it can be used to study grammars.