Mark Johnson

John Fry

Richard T. Oehrle

Josef van Genabith

Andrew Kehler

Fernando C. N. Pereira

Vijay Saraswat

John Lamping

Richard Crouch

This introduction to and overview of the "glue" approach is the first book to bring together the research of the major contributors to the field. A new, deductive approach to the syntax-semantics interface integrates two mature and successful lines of research: logical deduction for semantic composition and the Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) approach to the analysis of linguistic structure. It is often referred to as the "glue" approach because of the role of logic in "gluing" meanings together. The "glue" approach has attracted significant attention from, among others, logicians working in the relatively new and active field of linear logic; linguists interested in a novel deductive approach to the interface between syntax and semantics within a nontransformational, constraint-based syntactic framework; and computational linguists and computer scientists interested in an approach to semantic composition that is grounded in a conceptually simple but powerful computational framework.This introduction to and overview of the "glue" approach is the first book to bring together the research of the major contributors to the field. Contributors Richard Crouch, Mary Dalrymple, John Fry, Vineet Gupta, Mark Johnson, Andrew Kehler, John Lamping, Dick Oehrle, Fernando Pereira, Vijay Saraswat, Josef van Genabith

The Resource Logic Approach

Semantics and Syntax in Lexical Functional Grammar

Concurrent Constraint Programming introduces a new and rich class of programminglanguages based on the notion of computing with partial information, or constraints, that synthesizeand extend work on concurrent logic programming and that offer a promising approach for treatingthorny issues in the semantics of concurrent, nondeterministic programming languages.Saraswatdevelops an elegant and semantically tractable framework for computing with constraints, emphasizingtheir importance for communication and control in concurrent, programming languages. He describesthe basic paradigm, illustrates its structure, discusses various augmentations, gives a simpleimplementation of a concrete language, and specifies its connections with other formalisms.In thisframework, concurrently executing agents communicate by placing and checking constraints on sharedvariables in a common store. The major form of concurrency control in the system is through theoperations of Atomic Tell - an agent may instantaneously place constraints only if they areconsistent with constraints that have already been placed - and Blocking Ask - an agent must blockwhen it checks a constraint that is not yet known to hold. Other operations at a finer granularityof atomicity are also presented.Saraswat introduces and develops the concurrent constraint family ofprogramming languages based on these ideas, shows how various constraint systems can naturallyrealize data structures common in computer science, and presents a formal operational semantics formany languages in the concurrent constraint family. In addition, he provides a concrete realizationof the paradigm on a sequential machine by presenting a compiler for the concurrent constraintlanguage Herbrand and demonstrates a number of constraint-based concurrent programming techniquesthat lead to novel presentations of algorithms for many concurrent programming problems.Vijay A.Saraswat is Member of the Research Staff at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.

Concurrent Constraint Programming

Vijay Saraswat

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