Eckhard Bick - VISL

first, - but soon, it would move the bricks in unpredictable ways, it would be the
sentient being, thinking, reacting, surprising you.
This is what has fascinated me ever since I made my school’s Wang play
checkers. With my projects evolving from the unprofessionally naive to the
unprofessionally experimental, I programmed creativity by filtering random input for
patterns and symmetry, I made my own Eliza, I built self-learning teaching tools, and
I tried to make a computer translate. I was thrilled by the idea of a perfect memory in
my digital student, the instantaneous dictionary, by never having to learn a piece of
information twice.
Along the way things became somewhat less unprofessional, and I
accumulated some experience with NLP, constructing machine-readable dictionaries
for Danish, Esperanto and Portuguese, and – in 1986 – a morphological analyser and
MT-program for Danish 2 . Then – in 1994 – I heard a highly contagious lecture by
Fred Karlsson presenting his Constraint Grammar formalism for context based
disambiguation of morphological and syntactic ambiguities. I was fascinated both by
the robustness of the English Constraint Grammar (Karlsson et. al., 1991) and its
word based notational system of tags integrating both morphology and flat
dependency syntax in a way that allowed easy handling by a computer’s text
processing tools. It was not clear at the time (and still is not) up to which level of
syntactic or even semantic analysis Constraint Grammar can be made to work, and it
had never – at any larger scale – been applied to Romance languages. So I decided to
try it out on Portuguese 3 , working upwards from morphology to syntax and
semantics, in the framework of a Ph.D. project in Computer Linguistics. The goal
was the automatic analysis of free running Portuguese text, i.e. to build a computer
program (a morphological tagger and a syntactic parser) that would take an ordinary
text file - typed, mailed or scanned - as input and produce grammatically analysed
output as unambiguous and error-free as possible. My ultimate motivation, the
raison d’être of my digital child, has always been applicational – encompassing the
production of research corpora 4 , communication and teaching tools, information
handling and, ultimately, machine translation. But in the process of making the
digital toddler walk, I would have to fight and tame the Beast , as my supervisor
Hans Arndt called it, the ever-changing and multi-faceted creation which is human
language. I would have to chart the lexical landscape of Portuguese, to define the
categories and structures I would ask my parser to recognise, and to check both
tradition, introspection and grammatical intuition against raw and real corpus data.
Many times, this process has turned back on itself, with the dynamics of the ”tool
grammar” (i.e. the growing Constraint Grammar rule set) forcing new distinctions or
2 This system - “Danmorf” - has been revived in 1999, to become the morphological kernel of the Danish “free text”
section of the VISL-project at Odense University, and can be visited at http://visl.hum.sdu.dk.
3 Romance languages, with the possible exception of French, share much of their syntactic structure, and also most
morphological categories. Even many lexical items, not least pronouns and conjunctions, can often be matched one-onone
across languages. At the time of writing (1999), I have begun to adapt my Portuguese Constraint Grammar for
Spanish, with encouraging results (http://visl.hum.sdu.dk).
4 The largest annotation task so far, completed in november 1999, has been tha annotation of a 90 million word corpus
of Brazilian Portuguese, for a research group at the Catholic University of São Paulo.
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