A Non - Generative Constraint - Based FormalismPaper

Most of modern linguistic theories rely on the notion of constraints. However, only few applications try to implement the parsing process directly with constraint programming: in most cases, constraints are interpreted in a passive sense, the parsing process itself being no diierent to that of classical deriva-tional approaches. We show in this paper that the problem comes from the representation of linguistic information and the generative interpretation of the relation between grammar and language. We propose a new approach, called Property Grammar in which all syntactic information is represented with constraints, the parsing process being an actual constraint resolution mechanism.