Computational construction grammar : a usage-based approach

This Element introduces a usage-based computational approach to Construction Grammar that draws on techniques from natural language processing and unsupervised machine learning.

This work explores how to represent constructions, how to learn constructions from a corpus, and how to arrange the constructions in a grammar as a network.

From a theoretical perspective, this Element examines how construction grammars emerge from usage alone as complex systems, with slot-constraints learned at the same time that constructions are learned.

From a practical perspective, this work is accompanied by a Python package which enables linguists to incorporate construction grammars into their own corpus-based work.

The computational experiments in this Element are important for testing the learnability, variability, and confirmability of Construction Grammar as a theory of language.

All code examples will leverage the cloud computing platform Code Ocean to guide readers through implementation of these algorithms.