Eckhard Bick. Introduction to Constraint Grammar

Introduced by Fred Karlsson at Helsinki University in the early 1990ies, Constraint Grammar (CG) is about to celebrate its 20th anniversary as a robust method of rule-based parsing, and individual grammars as well as multi-stage parsers are now available for a large variety of languages. Constraint Grammar has also proven to be useful in applied scenarios beyond corpus annotation, such as grammar checking and machine translation. Over the last 5 years, substantial improvements have been made to the method, which has grown from shallow to deep parsing and today allows the integration of dependency structures, statistical data and feature unification.
However, the CG community is still largely based at a few research centres  in Scandinavia (University of Southern Denmark, Oslo University, Tromsø University, Helsinki University etc.) and a few European countries (Estonia, Ireland, Spain …). We believe that one of the reasons for this is the fact that no university offers regular dedicated courses in Constraint Grammar, de facto restricting activities to funded and commercial projects, and that an ESSLLI course would be the ideal stage to give interested researchers and students from other areas a chance to learn how to use the CG method and to apply it to their own projects.
The proposed introductory course will concentrate on the newest and most refined version of the CG paradigm, as implemented in the open source CG3 compiler (http://beta.visl.sdu.dk/constraint_grammar.html), letting participants build their own small experimental annotation grammars on partially pre-annotated text, covering part-of-speech disambiguation, syntactic function mapping and dependency annotation, among others. At the theoretical level, both descriptive and methodological issues will be discussed, including some comparison with other methods.

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