Fluid Construction Grammar: State of the Art and Future Outlook

Fluid Construction Grammar (FCG - https://fcg-net.org) (Steels 2004; van Trijp et al. 2022; Beuls & Van Eecke 2023) is a computational framework that aims to operationalise the foundational principles underlying constructionist approaches to language. On a high level, the FCG framework serves two main purposes. On the one hand, it aims to provide a solid methodological basis for studying the emergence, evolution, acquisition and processing of language from a construction grammar perspective, through a standardised formalisation and a tractable computational operationalisation. On the other hand, it aims to facilitate the building of intelligent agents that are capable of learning to communicate with humans and each other through languages that exhibit the robustness, flexibility and adaptivity of human languages.

In this talk, we will provide a brief introduction to the FCG research programme, reflecting on what has been achieved so far and identifying key challenges for the future. We will start by situating the FCG framework within the field of construction grammar and will then lay out in a step-by-step manner how FCG provides a faithful computational operationalisation of the basic tenets of construction grammar. We will then discuss how constructions are learned as compositional generalisations over recurring syntactico-semantic patterns (Nevens et al. 2022; Doumen et al. 2023) and will proceed with an overview of applications that integrate FCG technologies. Finally, we will consider a number of key challenges and opportunities for future computational construction grammar research and will conclude that the automatic learning of large-scale, usage-based construction grammars that support both language comprehension and production is a promising and timely research direction that is now well within reach.

References

Beuls, K., & Van Eecke, P. (2023) Fluid Construction Grammar: State of the art and future outlook. In Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Construction Grammars and NLP (CxGs+NLP, GURT/SyntaxFest 2023), pages 41–50.

Doumen, J., Beuls, K., & Van Eecke, P. (2023). Modelling language acquisition through syntactico-semantic pattern finding. Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2023, pages 1347–1357.

Nevens, J., Doumen, J., Van Eecke, P., & Beuls, K. (2022). Language acquisition through intention reading and pattern finding. Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 15-25.

Steels, L. (2004). Constructivist Development of Grounded Construction Grammar. In Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-04), pages 9–16.

van Trijp, R., Beuls, K., & Van Eecke, P. (2022). The FCG editor: An innovative environment for engineering computational