Constraint Programming in Computational Linguistics
Author: Alexander Koller and Joachim Niehren
Editor: D. Barker-Plummer and D. Beaver and J. van Benthem and P. Scotto di Luzio
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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