Fluid Construction Grammar

Fluid Construction Grammar

Fluid construction grammar (FCG) is a computational construction grammar formalism that allows computational linguists to formally write down the inventory of lexical and grammatical constructions as well as to do experiments in language learning and language evolution. FCG wants to be an open instrument that can be used by construction grammarians who want to formulate their intuitions and data in a precise way and who want to test the implications of their grammar designs for language parsing, production and learning.

FCG integrates many notions from contemporary computational linguistics such as feature structure and unification-based language processing. Rules are considered bi-directional and hence usable both for parsing and production. Processing is flexible in the sense that it can even cope with partially ungrammatical or incomplete sentences. FCG is called 'fluid' because it acknowledges the premise that language users constantly change and update their grammars. The research on FCG is headed by Luc Steels whose team is working at the VUB AI Lab in Brussels and the Sony Computer Science Lab in Paris.