A fully operational processing system for construction grammars
Fluid Construction Grammar (FCG) is a computational framework that provides a formalism for representing construction grammars and a processing engine that supports construction-based language comprehension and production. Download the FCG Editor today and start living your constructional dreams!
New!! The FCG Editor now includes packages for learning constructions from PropBank-annotated corpora or situated communicative interactions!
Great news: writing constructions has never been easier than with our new FCG Editor! The FCG editor, which is available for Microsoft Windows, macOS and Linux, allows you to quickly install and test Fluid Construction Grammar without having to set up a complete Lisp programming environment or the Babel software architecture. It includes all of the essential functionalities of FCG for rapidly defining and visualizing constructions in your web browser, and to develop grammar fragments that you can use for language comprehension and production. You can download the FCG Editor for free at this page.
The FCG editor is based on a first design by Dr Remi van Trijp, and has since then been co-developed by the Sony Computer Science Laboratories Paris and the VUB Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
The journal of Constructions and Frames has published a special issue (2017, 9(2)) on approaches to the Verb Phrase in Fluid Construction Grammar with examples for Dutch, English, Spanish and Russian. The complete issue can be found on the publisher’s website. Every paper is accompanied by a web demonstration, which are made available on the demos page.
Natural language processing is one of the most challenging and important areas in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. At Sony CSL Paris, we have pioneered new language technologies based on “constructional” language processing for achieving deep semantic analyses and bidirectional grammars for language production and comprehension.
Job description
We are currently looking for a software engineer / computational linguist who will develop an industrial-strength implementation of our open-source software platform “Fluid Construction Grammar”. Your responsibilities include:
– Implementation of an industrial-strength grammar architecture based on Fluid Construction Grammar (www.fcg-net.org);
– Interface with statistical NLP modules;
– Monitor data acquisition and curation; design control, implementation and improvements;
– Propose and develop new prototypes and applications
– Manage communication and cooperate on legal issues concerning applications
Qualifications:
– Master or Doctoral Degree in Computer Science, Computational Linguistics, Artificial Intelligence; or equivalent practical experience
– Minimum of 5 years of experience in developing projects, preferably in NLP research or related domains
– Independent worker with leadership abilities and the ability to cooperate in a constantly evolving international team
– Multilingual speaker
– Experience in programming languages and in particular symbolic programming
Our offer:
You will earn a competitive salary and get to work in the heart of Paris (5th arrondissement). Extra benefits include meal vouchers, 50% reimbursement of your public transport subscription, and an attractive health insurance contract.
About Sony CSL Paris
Sony CSL Paris was founded in 1996 and is a small but booming research cell, focusing on the following areas: personal music experience, developmental cognitive robots, self-organizing communication systems, and sustainable environment simulation.
Sony Computer Science Laboratory is engaged in several European projects such as FLOW MACHINES, PRAISE, IDGF, LRN2CRE8 and other projects.
Research in Personal Music Experience focuses on the future of musical listening by building prototypes of interactive devices and ethnographic experiments to see what people find exciting in music and how new ways of listening integrate in their lives.
Research in Language is dedicated to constructional language processing and self-organising communication systems. Constructional language processing is a novel approach to the production and comprehension of language that based on rich semantics and a powerful data structure called “constructions”. Research in self-organizing communication systems investigates through computational simulations and mathematical models how a group of autonomous agents/robots could be able to invent and negotiate a communication system similar to human natural languages.
How to build a sustainable society has recently become a major issue as natural resources get depleted and climate change is of great concern. Sony CSL Paris has launched a number of projects to raise awareness about the issues through volunteer computing and participatory food production.
Sony CSL Paris plays a leading role in the areas it has chosen to be active in. It produces a steady stream of papers in the most prestigious journals and conferences. The lab is viewed as highly innovative and plays a leading role in European IT research.
Contact
Candidates should send their cv and motivation letter to Dr Remi van Trijp (remi@csl.sony.fr) before 28 June 2017. The contract starts 1 september 2017.
Computational construction grammar has really taken flight since the 2017 AAAI Spring Symposium on Computational Construction Grammar and Natural Language Understanding in Stanford. Fluid Construction Grammar was of course well represented, and we want to highlight the following contributions:
As part of the SONY CSL Paris open day on October 27th, we will be demonstrating the latest features and applications of Fluid Construction Grammar. In particular, we are proud to debut two important new developments in FCG. Firstly, FCG Interactive, a web application that gives you the power of FCG from your own web browser, is live and in its beta release. Secondly, our first large scale English grammar, developed by Remi Van Trijp, will be available on FCG Interactive. On the FCG application side of things, we will demonstrate how FCG can be used to solve challenging English-Japanese machine translation. This takes the form of a live, multi-lingual, chat room translation demo.
The ‘Constructional Language Processing’ and ‘Participative multi-user multi-language chat room’ demos will be running from 15:00 – 20:00. Registration is free and the event is open to everyone, so please do come along.
The full programme of events is available here:
Katrien Beuls and Remi van Trijp organize the annual BKL-CBL conference 2015 that will take place at the VUB the 8th of June. The topic of the conference is Computational Construction Grammar and Constructional change. Confirmed speakers include Graeme Trousdale, Luc Steels, Kristin Davidse, Peter Petré and Arie Verhagen.
Apart from the main conference, a tutorial on Fluid Construction Grammar will take place on the 7th and 9th of june.
Both conference and tutorial are free of charge.
You can find the details of the BKL-CBL conference and the tutorial on Fluid Construction Grammar on this link.
Our latest video tutorial handles long-distance dependencies, one of the most hotly debated topics in linguistics. Make sure to check the tutorial here and come back soon for part 2 of the lecture!
This week’s lecture teaches you how to use feature matrices for handling complex linguistic phenomena, ranging from case agreement to feature indeterminacy and feature neutrality. It also shows you how to use the Expand operator.
This lecture handles one of the most salient aspects of construction grammar: argument structure constructions. In construction grammar, argument realization is explained through the free interaction of lexical and grammatical constructions where the same lexical construction may be combined with different argument structure constructions. The lecture will teach you how this free combination is possible, and how coercion can be achieved.