Inducing Constraint Grammars

Constraint Grammar rules are induced from corpora. A simple scheme based on local information, i.e., on lexical biases and next-neighbour contexts, extended through the use of barriers, reached 87.3 percent precision (1.12 tags/word) at 98.2 percent recall. The results compare favourably with other methods that are used for similar tasks although they are by no means as good as the results achieved using the original hand-written rules developed over several years time.