Automating Construction Work Data-Oriented Parsing and Constructivist Accounts of Language Acquisition

The constructionist approach to language has long proven its merits as a theoretical framework guiding linguistic observations. However, relatively little work has been dedicated to providing a precise, formalized definition of constructions and the mechanisms by means of which they are acquired. In giving an overview of recent work in Data-Oriented Parsing (DOP), we show how the theoretical development of construction grammar and usage-based approaches to language acquisition can benefit from the converging evidence and novel insights that computational models such as DOP can provide us with. In this chapter, we introduce DOP and compare its properties to usage-based and constructionist ideas about the nature of grammar and its acquisition. We discuss the unsupervised incarnation of DOP, U-DOP, and show how it can be used to address nativist hypotheses about the learnability of grammatical patterns. Finally, we propose an extension of the formalism that is able to learn a meaning-driven grammar from unstructured input data.