This paper describes a new, psychologically-plausible model of human sentence interpretation, based on a new model of linguistic structure, Construction Grammar. This on-line, parallel, probabilistic interpreter accounts for a wide variety of psycholinguistic results on lexical access, idiom processing, parsing preferences, and studies of gap-filling and other valence ambiguities, including var...

The objective of this paper is to bring us a little bit closer to a general Neuro -Cognitive Theory of Cognition in Language and Thought that can account for the mechanics of language understanding, studied by the models of AI or connectionism, and the biology, explained by neurology and psychobiology. Embodied Construction Grammar (Bergen et al. 2001) provides a formalism to show conceptual re...

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 ...

Fluid Construction Grammar (FCG) is a new linguistic formalism designed to explore in how far a construction grammar approach can be used for handling open-ended grounded dialogue, i.e. dialogue between or with autonomous embodied agents about the world as experienced through their sensory-motor apparatus. We seek scalable, open-ended language systems by giving agents both the ability to use ex...

An important part of textual inference is making deductions involving monotonicity, that is, determining whether a given assertion entails restrictions or relaxations of that assertion. For instance, the statement ‘We know the epidemic spread quickly’ does not entail ‘We know the epidemic spread quickly via fleas’, but ‘We doubt the epidemic spread quickly’ entails ‘We doubt the epidemic spread...

In this paper we present SINTESI, a system for the knowledge extraction from Italian inputs, currently under development in our re,search centre. It is used on short descriptive diagnostic texts, in order to summarise their technical content and to build a knowledge base on faults. Often in these texts complex linguistic constructions like conjunctions, negations, ellipsis and anaphorae are inv...

In Construction Grammar, rules of syntactic combination (descriptions of local trees, e.g., a verb phrase and its daughters) have meanings. These meanings are represented by syntactic, semantic and usage features that attach to the mother or daughter nodes in these trees (Sag 2007, 2008). A construction defines the distinctive properties of a mode of combination that is part of the grammar of a...

Construction-based approaches to grammar are driven by the insight that meaning plays a crucial role in answering this question: the meanings of both words and grammatical structures can affect grammaticality, and they should therefore be incorporated into grammatical representations. To wit, the various approaches presented in this volume take this tack in predicting the grammaticality of utte...

This paper presents implementations of generative management method for morphological variation of query keywords. The method is called FCG, Frequent Case Generation. It is based on the skewed distributions of word forms in natural languages and is suitable for languages that either have fair amount of morphological variation or are morphologically very rich. The paper reports implementation an...