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<Paper uid="W06-3508">
  <Title>Searching for Grammar Right</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="57" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Since any particular language  changes constantly (Cf. Hopper and Traugott, 2003; Bybee, 1998) and even varies across domains, users, registers etc. - scalable natural language understanding systems must be able to cope with language variation and change. Moreover, due to the fact that any natural language understanding system, which is based on some formal representation of that language's grammar, will always only be able to represent a portion of what is going on in any particular language at the present time, we need to find systematic ways of endowing natural language understanding systems with means of learning new  This claim also holds within any solidified system of conventionalized form-meaning pairings, e.g. dialects, chronolects, sociolects, idiolects, jargons, etc. forms, new meanings and, ultimately, new form-meaning pairings, i.e. constructions.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Constructions are the basic building blocks, posited by a particular grammar framework called Construction Grammar, and are defined as follows: &amp;quot;C is a construction iffdef C is a form-meaning pair &lt;Fi, Si&gt; such that some aspect of Fi or some aspect of Si is not strictly predictable from C's component parts or from other previously established constructions.&amp;quot; (Goldberg, 1995:4).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Construction Grammar originated from earlier insights in functional and usage-based models of language mainly supposed by cognitive linguists (e.g. Lakoff, 1987; Fillmore and Kay, 1987; Kay, 2002; Talmy, 1988; etc.). It has been devised to handle actually occurring natural language, which notoriously contains non-literal, elliptic, contextdependent, metaphorical or underspecified linguistic expressions. These phenomena still present a challenge for today's natural language understanding systems. In addition to these advantages, we adhere to principles proposed by other constructivists as e.g. Tomasello (2003) that language acquisition is a usage-based phenomenon, contrasting approaches by generative grammarians who assume an innate grammar (Chomsky, 1981). Furthermore, we agree to the idea that grammatical phenomena also contribute to the semantics of a sentence which is the reason why syntax cannot be defined independently of semantics of a grammar.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> A more detailed outline of construction grammar and the principles we adhered to in formalizing it will be given in sections 2 and 3.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> The input to the system is natural language data as found on the web, as e.g. in news tickers or blogs, initially restricted to the soccer domain. As  the learning process develops the input will gradually be extended to other domains. A description of the corpus and its selection process will be given in section 4. Section 5 provides an outlook on the learning paradigm, while the last section presents some future issues and conclusions.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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