Concurrent Constraint Programming in Oz
for Natural Language Processing

This script was developed jointly with a lecture hold at the departments of computer science and computational linguistics at the University of Saarbrücken. Since 1998 the course was given regularly once per year and will be offered again starting from October 2002.

This script is available online in [HTML], [Postscript] and [PDF].

This lecture introduces concurrent constraint programming in Mozart/Oz and shows how to model natural language processing on basis of this paradigm. The lecture addresses students of computer science who are interested in constraint programming or Mozart/Oz and students of computational linguistics who want to learn natural language processing with modern programming technology beyond Prolog and LISP.

The lecture introduces the following topics, all of which are presented with running programs and lots of practical exercises:

• functional programming and data structures in Mozart/Oz,
• chart parsing for context free grammars,
• unification based parsing,
• concurrent constraint programming,
• constraint solving for scope underspecification in natural language semantics,
• constraint solving for parsing with dependency grammar.

The lectures presupposes as few knowledge as possible, so that it can address students of computer science and computational linguistics simultaneously.