Fluid Construction Grammar is released
Fluid Construction Grammar is a natural language parsing and generation system developed by researchers at www.emergent-languages.org. The system features a production rule mechanism for both parsing and generation using a reversible grammar. I just released a Java reimplementation of the original developers’ Lisp implementation. It is available at the SourceForge project site.
There are enough grammar rules developed to parse the sentence “Jill slides blocks to Jack”, creating logical propositions, equivalent to RDF statements as a result. These same propositions can be input to the system to render the original sentence.
Because the original parsing design operates on whole sentences at once, this release will be feature-frozen and development will proceed on a fork called IncrementalFCG. In order for a parser to function in a cognitively plausible manner, it must process an utterance one unit (e.g. word) at a time. I am developing an incremental FCG parser that will process Controlled English utterances left-to-right and word-by-word. The production rules will implement a portion of Jerry Ball’s Double-R grammar for English.
td on 12 Dec 2007 at 9:04 pm #
tres cool. Question: How might the raw performance of the Java implementation compare to statistical approaches like those used in ASKNet (http://svn.ask.it.usyd.edu.au/trac/candc/wiki)? I know the domain is very different from dialog, but I am interested in how general FCG’s capabilities are.
Steve Reed on 13 Dec 2007 at 12:47 pm #
C&C and Boxer are comparable in output to Fluid Construction Grammar parsing in that what is desired is to transform the input text to a set of propositions (e.g. RDF statements) with respect to the discourse context. Statistical parsers are fast, (I used the Charniak parser at Cycorp) but my emphasis now is on precise understanding so I need a construction parser in which everything can be treated as an idiom if necessary. Another issue is that NL generation is as important as parsing in the Texai dialog system. So the FCG reversible grammar is very attractive.
In summary FCG’s abilities are limited only by the given set of grammar rules which at the present time are created manually, unlike the statistical approach of C&C.