Book Review: Design Patterns in Fluid Construction Grammar edited by Luc Steels

In computational modeling of natural language phenomena, there are at least three modes of research. The currently dominant statistical paradigm typically prioritizes instance coverage: Data-driven methods seek to use as much information observed in data as possible in order to generalize linguistic analyses to unseen instances. A second approach prioritizes detailed description of grammatical phenomena, that is, forming and defending theories with a focus on a small number of instances. A third approach might be called integrative: Rather than addressing phenomena in isolation, different approaches are brought together to address multiple challenges in a unified framework, and the behavior of the system is demonstratedwith a small number of instances.Design Patterns in Fluid Construction Grammar (DPFCG) exemplifies the third approach, introducing a linguistic formalism called Fluid Construction Grammar (FCG) that addresses parsing, production, and learning in a single computational framework. The book emphasizes grammar-engineering, following broad-coverage descriptive paradigms that can be traced back to Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (GPSG) (Gazdar et al. 1985), Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) (Bresnan 2000), HeadDriven Phrase-Structure Grammar (HPSG) (Sag and Wasow 1999), and Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) (Steedman 1996). In all of these cases, a formal metaframework allows computational linguists to formalize their hypotheses and intuitions about a language’s grammatical behavior and then explore how these representational choices affect the processing of natural language utterances. Many of the aforementioned approaches have engendered large-scale platforms that can be used and reused to provide formal description of grammars for different languages, such as Par-Gram for LFG (Butt et al. 2002) and the LinGO Grammar Matrix for HPSG (Bender, Flickinger, and Oepen 2002).