CG-3 - Beyond Classical Constraint Grammar

This paper discusses methodological strengths and shortcomings of the Constraint Grammar paradigm (CG), showing how the classical CG formalism can be extended to achieve greater expressive power and how it can be enhanced and hybridized with techniques from other parsing paradigms. We present a new, largely theory­independent CG framework and rule compiler (CG­3), that allows the linguist to write CG rules incorporating different types of linguistic information and methodology from a wide range of parsing approaches, covering not only CG's native topological technique, but also dependency grammar, phrase structure grammar and unification grammar. In addition, we allow the integration of statistical­numerical constraints and non­discrete tag and string sets.