[Ltg] SALS-SIG Seminar [Philippe Blache, May 17]

[Stephen.Wan at csiro.au]

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SALS-SIG Seminar
 - see: http://www.clt.mq.edu.au/Events/SALS-SIG.html

Monday, May 17, 2004 at 11am
Macquarie Uni, E6A 357
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Speaker: Philippe Blache
Title: Property Grammars: a new framework for non-generative approaches

Abstract: 
Modern linguistic theories, formalisms and techniques have to take into
consideration the fact that linguistic information is spread, incomplete
and partial. This requires a flexible approach capable of explaining how
different domains of linguistic analysis (prosody, pragmatics, syntax,
etc.) can interact in order to make an utterance understandable.
Moreover, linguistic realizations can have many different forms, more or
less canonical (literary texts, SMS, spoken language, ...). It is then
necessary to propose a robust and flexible solution. Usually, this
question is addressed in terms of relations between structures built for
each domain. However, several works (e.g. model-theoretic syntax or
construction grammars) have underlined the theoretical and practical
limits of such a view.

We present in this talk an alternative approach making it possible to
describe separately any information, whatever its level or granularity.
It is then possible to describe linguistic phenomena in terms of
interaction between different sources of information. The solution
consists of representing all kinds of information by means of
constraints, the parsing technique being a constraint satisfaction one.
It is then possible to characterize precisely the different properties
of an utterance. We will present in this perspective a formalism called
Property Grammars which implements these aspects.


Short bio:
Philippe Blache is a researcher in computational linguistics. He is the
director of the "Laboratoire Parole et Langage" (University of
Aix-en-Provence, France). His researches focus on the implementation of
linguistic theories and the development of constraint-based solutions
for natural language processing. He is a member of different 
international boards (European chapter of the ACL, ESSLLI standing 
committee).