Formal Grammar 2004

Aims and Scope

FG is a series of conferences on Formal Grammar, held in conjunction with the European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information, which takes place yearly in Europe. FG provides a forum for the presentation of new and original research on formal grammar, with particular regard to the application of formal methods to natural language analysis.
Themes of interest include, but are not limited to,

• formal and computational phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics;
• model-theoretic and proof-theoretic methods in linguistics;
• constraint-based and resource-sensitive approaches to grammar;
• learnability of formal grammar;
• the integration of stochastic and symbolic models of grammar;
• foundational, methodological and architectural issues in grammar.

Preface

FG-2004, the 9th conference on Formal Grammar, was held in Nancy, France on August 7/8, 2004. The conference included 11 contributed papers which are contained in this volume.

The objective of the Formal Grammar meetings is to provide a forum for the presentation of new and original research on formal grammar, with particular emphasis on the application of formal methods to natural language analysis. Themes of interest include, but are not limited to, formal and computational phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics; model-theoretic and proof-theoretic methods in linguistics; constraint-based and resource-sensitive approaches to grammar; learnability of formal grammar; integration of stochastic and symbolic models of grammar; foundational, methodological and architectural issues in grammar.

As in previous years, the call for papers elicited a fair number of very good submissions. We would like to thank the members of the program committee for their time and effort in evaluating these papers: Chris Brew, Miriam Butt, David Chiang, Tim Fernando, Philippe de Groote, Mark Hepple, Makoto Kanazawa, Jonas Kuhn, Shalom Lappin, Jens Michaelis, Guido Minnen, Uwe Mönnich, Stefan Müller, Mark-Jan Nederhof, James Rogers, Anoop Sarkar, Giorgio Satta.

The conference included also three invited talks by distinguished researchers. Ed Keenan from the University of California at Los Angeles gave a lecture on “Bare Grammar: A New Approach to Language Universals”. Glyn Morrill from the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya presented joint work with Anna Gavarró “On aphasic comprehension and working memory load”. Giorgio Satta from the University of Padua gave a presentation on “Local Parallel Rewriting: Theory and Applications”.

We are indebted to all the authors who submitted papers to the meeting, and to all participants in the conference.

On behalf of the Organizing Committee, which consisted of Gerhard Jäger, Paola Monachesi, Gerald Penn and Shuly Wintner, we are happy to present this volume.

December 2008 –Paola Monachesi, Gerhard Jäger, Gerald Penn and Shuly Wintner

On a snowy day in December 2013 I grabbed the files, did some final changes and now the proceedings are out.

December 2013 –Stefan Müller

Proceedings

The Proceedings are available as one PDF file or as individual pdfs:

• On Learning Discontinuous Dependencies from Positive Data Denis Béchet, Alexander Dikovsky, Annie Foret and Erwan Moreau
• Learning Dependency Languages from a Teacher Jérôme Besombes and Jean-Yves Marion
• An integrated approach to French liaison Olivier Bonami, Gilles Boyé, Jesse Tseng
• On Induction of Morphology Grammars and its Role in Bootstrapping Damir Ćavar, Joshua Herring, Toshikazu Ikuta, Paul Rodrigues, Giancarlo Schrementi
• Bidirectional Optimality for Regular Tree Languages Stephan Kepser
• Grammatical Framework and Multiple Context-Free Grammars Peter Ljunglöf
• Elliptical Constructions, Multiple Frontings, and Surface-Based Syntax Stefan Müller
• Type-Logical HPSG Carl Pollard
• About Spilled Beans and Shot Breezes: A New Word-level Approach to Idioms Jan-Philipp Soehn
• Resumption in Persian Relative Clauses Mehran Taghvaipour
• A Hierarchy of Mildly Context-Sensitive Dependency Grammars Anssi Yli-Jyrä and Matti Nykänen