Constraint Technology in Computational

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 combi-natoric explosion of (potential) readings seem to be solvable in an ee-cient and elegant manner using constraint programming. We illustrate our claim by two recent examples, one from the area of underspeciied semantics and one from parsing.