The article, published in Constructions and Frames earlier this week, brings together prior work on the computational learning of form-meaning pairings, including – but not limited to – experiments that use Fluid Construction Grammar. The article aims to synthesise the variety of methodologies that have been proposed to date and the results that have been obtained. Moreover, it identifies those parts of the challenge that have been successfully tackled and reveal those that require further research. Finally, it offers a comprehensive roadmap which can help to boost and streamline future research efforts on the computational learning of large-scale, usage-based construction grammars. The article can be read through the publisher’s web page (open access): https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/cf.23026.dou

We are happy to announce that our latest FCG paper “A Computational Construction Grammar Approach to Semantic Frame extraction” has now been published in the Linguistics Vanguard.

The paper describes a novel approach to extracting semantic frames from texts, with a case study on extracting frames of causation from newspaper articles. The computational construction grammar approach yields a word-level F1 score of 78.5%, outperforming a commonly used approach based on conditional random fields by 4.5 percentage points.

Have you always wondered what the role of construction grammar could be in solving AI benchmark tasks, such as for example visual question answering? Our latest paper “Computational Construction Grammar for Visual Question Answering” published in the Linguistics Vanguard shows how we were able to write a construction grammar that could parse natural language questions into directly executable queries that can be used to retrieve information in images. Find out more about how we did it in the paper or check out the web demonstration.

Join us for the FCG tutorial on the 10th International Conference on Construction Grammar in Paris on 20 July 2018! Official registration is not yet open but you can already send us an e-mail if you would like to be informed about the practical details (info@fcg-net.org). More information can be found on the tutorial’s web page.

We are organising a two-day (6h) practical course on Fluid Construction Grammar. The course is part of the Interdisciplinary College (IK) Spring School in Günne, Germany and takes place on 15-16 March 2017.

For more information, see the following website: www.fcg-net.org/workshops/ik-construction-grammar

Course Description:

Construction Grammar is an innovative approach to language that focuses strongly on semantics, cognitive processes and learning. As such, it has the potential to lead to more powerful language technologies and more comprehensive accounts of language processing than psychology and computational linguistics are able to offer today. This course will teach its participants how the key concepts of construction grammar can be implemented in computational models for deep language processing that are capable of both comprehension and formulation. Moreover, students will also learn how to implement learning operators for more robust processing, and how to evaluate their grammars. Each session will take the form of a hands-on atelier using Fluid Construction Grammar (FCG), an advanced computational platform for developing constructional processing and learning models.

We are proud to announce the 30th issue of the Belgian Journal of Linguistics on Computational Construction Grammar and Constructional Change. Please join us for two keynotes and a festive reception on Monday 19 December 2016, at 4pm, in the Royal Library of Belgium in Brussels.

More information on the program and the registration (free but mandatory) can be found on the event’s webpage.

Computational Construction Grammar and Natural Language Understanding

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

This symposium is primarily targeting researchers in natural language processing/understanding and computational linguistics, but will have broader appeal to the larger AI community, specifically researchers in knowledge representation, man-machine interaction, and machine learning. The symposium focuses on recent TECHNICAL advances in computational formalisms for construction grammar, machine learning of construction grammar, and use of construction grammar in natural language understanding and production. The presentation and demonstration of working systems is highly encouraged.

Areas of interest include:

1. What unifies constructional approaches to language?

2. Formalisms and implementations of construction grammar (CxG)

3. Constructicons, corpora annotated for CxG, and statistical construction learning.

4. Construction grammar learning by physical robots.

5. Deep Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Production.

6. Relations of CxG to the brain, development, and evolution.

7. Application efforts.

Paper submissions may take the form of long papers (4-8 pages in AAAI format, including references) for oral presentation or short papers (up to 4 pages in AAAI format, including references) for poster presentation. Evidence of a working implementation, e.g. through a web-accessible demonstration, is highly encouraged. Individual submissions for oral or short papers are due by OCTOBER 28 and authors will be notified by November 29. There will be one or more hands-on interactive sessions where participants can show implemented CxG systems.

Suggestions for panels may be submitted by October 1 to either steels@arti.vub.ac.be or feldman@icsi.berkeley.edu

All papers for the symposium will be collected and made into an AAAI technical report, which will be distributed to attendees electronically and included in the AAAI Digital Library.

Symposium conveners: Jerome Feldman and Luc Steels

Additional members of program committee: Katrien Beuls, Adele Goldberg and Nancy Chang.

More information: https://ai.vub.ac.be/aaai-construction-grammar-2017/