Constraints On Rule Form

This volume of new work by prominent phonologists goes to the heart of current debates in phonological and linguistic theory: should the explanation of phonological variety be constraint or rule-based and, in the light of the resolution of this question, how in the mind does phonology interface with other components of the grammar. The book includes contributions from leading proponents of both sides of the argument and an extensive introduction setting out the history, nature, and more general linguistic implications of current phonological theory.

The definitive reference on Constraint Handling Rules, from the creator of the language.

Constraint-based linguistics is intersected by three fields: logic, linguistics, and computer sciences. The central theme that ties these different disciplines together is the notion of a linguistic formalism or metalanguage. This metalanguage has good mathematical properties, is designed to express descriptions of language, and has a semantics that can be implemented on a computer. Constraints, Language and Computation discusses the theory and practice of constraint-based computational linguistics. The book captures both the maturity of the field and some of its more interesting future prospects during a particulary important moment of development in this field.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the Joint ERCIM/CologNet International Workshop on Constraint Solving and Constraint Logic Programming, held in Cork, Ireland in June 2002. The 14 revised full papers presented were carefully selected for inclusion in the book during two rounds of reviewing and revision. Among the topics addressed are verification and debugging of constraint logic programs, modeling and solving CSPs, explanation generation, inference and inconsistency processing, SAT and 0/1 encodings of CSPs, soft constraints and constraint relaxation, real-world applications, and distributed constraint solving.

Computational cognitive modeling explores cognition by building computational models for cognitive processes, mechanisms and representations. Currently, implementations of cognitive models lack a formal foundation. This inhibits analysis. In this thesis, the cognitive architecture Adaptive Control of Thought - Rational (ACT-R) is formalized and embedded into the rule-based programming language Constraint Handling Rules (CHR). The powerful analytical methods of CHR, particularly confluence analysis, are extended by reasoning modulo equivalence relations. The results are applied to the domain of cognitive modeling.

Constraints are everywhere: most computational problems can be described in terms of restrictions imposed on the set of possible solutions, and constraint programming is a problem-solving technique that works by incorporating those restrictions in a programming environment. It draws on methods from combinatorial optimisation and artificial intelligence, and has been successfully applied in a number of fields from scheduling, computational biology, finance, electrical engineering and operations research through to numerical analysis. This textbook for upper-division students provides a thorough and structured account of the main aspects of constraint programming. The author provides many worked examples that illustrate the usefulness and versatility of this approach to programming, as well as many exercises throughout the book that illustrate techniques, test skills and extend the text. Pointers to current research, extensive historical and bibliographic notes, and a comprehensive list of references will also be valuable to professionals in computer science and artificial intelligence.

This outstanding 2004 volume presents an overview of linguistic research into the acquisition of phonology. Bringing together well-known researchers in the field, it focuses on constraints in phonological acquisition (as opposed to rules), and offers concrete examples of the formalization of phonological development in terms of constraint ranking. The first two chapters situate the research in its broader context, with an introduction by the editors providing a brief general tutorial on Optimality Theory. Chapter two serves to highlight the history of constraints in studies of phonological development, which predates their current ascent to prominence in phonological theory. The remaining chapters address a number of partially overlapping themes: the study of child production data in terms of constraints, learnability issues, perceptual development and its relation to the development of production, and second-language acquisition.

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming, CP 2000, held in Singapore in September 2000. The 31 revised full papers and 13 posters presented together with three invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from 101 submissions. All current issues of constraint processing, ranging from theoretical and foundational issues to applications in various fields are addressed.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming, CP 2001, held in Paphos, Cyprus, in November/December 2001. The 37 revised full papers, 9 innovative applications presentations, and 14 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 135 submissions. All current issues in constraint processing are addressed, ranging from theoretical and foundational issues to advanced and innovative applications in a variety of fields.