The fastest way to write your own computational construction grammar is by downloading the FCG Editor and starting to explore the included demo grammar and visualisations. The FCG Editor is available for all three major operating systems (Microsoft Windows, macOS and Linux). Alternatively, the FCG source code can be downloaded as part of the Babel software library.
New FCG Editor available!
Great news: writing constructions has never been easier than with our new FCG Editor! The FCG editor, which is available for Microsoft Windows, macOS and Linux, allows you to quickly install and test Fluid Construction Grammar without having to set up a complete Lisp programming environment or the Babel software architecture. It includes all of the essential functionalities of FCG for rapidly defining and visualizing constructions in your web browser, and to develop grammar fragments that you can use for language comprehension and production. You can download the FCG Editor for free at this page.
The FCG editor is based on a first design by Dr Remi van Trijp, and has since then been co-developed by the Sony Computer Science Laboratories Paris and the VUB Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
Bringing computational construction grammar into your classes and research
Paul Van Eecke and Katrien Beuls are organising a tutorial at the 11th International Conference on Construction Grammar in Antwerp on 17 August 2021. During the tutorial, we will walk you through the basics of computational construction grammar (CCxG), with a special focus on how the main ideas underlying construction grammar can be implemented using FCG. The tutorial will alternate between theory, hands-on exercises from the textbook and demonstrations of more advanced case studies. It targets in particular lecturers in construction grammar who wish to include CCxG into their courses, as well as scholars who would like to learn CCxG and use it in their research. For more information, please check the tutorial’s webpage.
A computational construction grammar approach to semantic frame extraction
We are happy to announce that our latest FCG paper “A Computational Construction Grammar Approach to Semantic Frame extraction” has now been published in the Linguistics Vanguard.
The paper describes a novel approach to extracting semantic frames from texts, with a case study on extracting frames of causation from newspaper articles. The computational construction grammar approach yields a word-level F1 score of 78.5%, outperforming a commonly used approach based on conditional random fields by 4.5 percentage points.
A grounded conversational agent for visual dialog
Visual question answering
Have you always wondered what the role of construction grammar could be in solving AI benchmark tasks, such as for example visual question answering? Our latest paper “Computational Construction Grammar for Visual Question Answering” published in the Linguistics Vanguard shows how we were able to write a construction grammar that could parse natural language questions into directly executable queries that can be used to retrieve information in images. Find out more about how we did it in the paper or check out the web demonstration.
Two open PhD positions in computational construction grammar
FCG tutorial video
We’ve made the first part of the tutorial we gave at the latest ICCG conference available on YouTube now. You can watch it here:
Constructions at Play!
Join us for the FCG tutorial on the 10th International Conference on Construction Grammar in Paris on 20 July 2018! Official registration is not yet open but you can already send us an e-mail if you would like to be informed about the practical details (info@fcg-net.org). More information can be found on the tutorial’s web page.
Special issue on Fluid Construction Grammar and the Verb Phrase
The journal of Constructions and Frames has published a special issue (2017, 9(2)) on approaches to the Verb Phrase in Fluid Construction Grammar with examples for Dutch, English, Spanish and Russian. The complete issue can be found on the publisher’s website. Every paper is accompanied by a web demonstration, which are made available on the demos page.