Publication details

Saarland University Computer Science

Constraint Programming in Computational Linguistics

Alexander Koller, Joachim Niehren

Words, Proofs, and Dialog, Vol. 141 of CSLI Lecture Notes, pp. 95-122, CSLI Press, 2002

Constraint programming is a programming paradigm that was originally invented in computer science to deal with hard combinatorial problems. Recently, constraint programming has evolved into a technology which permits to solve hard industrial scheduling and optimization problems. We argue that existing constraint programming technology can be useful for applications in natural language processing. Some problems whose treatment with traditional methods requires great care to avoid combinatorial explosion of (potential) readings seem to be solvable in an efficient and elegant manner using constraint programming. We illustrate our claim by two recent examples, one from the area of underspecified semantics and one from parsing.

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