Constraints and Language

More information on the Publisher's webpage: http://www.cambridgescholars.com/constraints-and-languageInternational audienceThe concept of "constraint" is widely used in linguistics, computer science, and psychology. However, its implementation varies widely depending on the research domain: namely, language description, knowledge representation, cognitive modelling, and problem solving. These various uses of constraints offer complementary views on intelligent mechanisms. For example, in-depth descriptions implementing constraints are used in linguistics to filter out syntactic or discursive structures by means of dedicated description languages and constraint ranking. In computer science, the constraint programming paradigm views constraints as a whole, which can be used, for example, to build specific structures. Finally, in psycholinguistics, experiments are carried out to investigate the role of constraints within cognitive processes (both in comprehension and production), with various applications such as dialog modelling for people with disabilities. In this context, Constraints and Language builds an extended overview of the use of constraints to model and process language

Fifty years of Prolog and beyond

Both logic programming in general and Prolog in particular have a long and fascinating history, intermingled with that of many disciplines they inherited from or catalyzed. A large body of research has been gathered over the last 50 years, supported by many Prolog implementations. Many implementations are still actively developed, while new ones keep appearing. Often, the features added by different systems were motivated by the interdisciplinary needs of programmers and implementors, yielding systems that, while sharing the “classic” core language, in particular, the main aspects of the ISO-Prolog standard, also depart from each other in other aspects. This obviously poses challenges for code portability. The field has also inspired many related, but quite different languages that have created their own communities. This article aims at integrating and applying the main lessons learned in the process of evolution of Prolog. It is structured into three major parts. First, we overview the evolution of Prolog systems and the community approximately up to the ISO standard, considering both the main historic developments and the motivations behind several Prolog implementations, as well as other logic programming languages influenced by Prolog. Then, we discuss the Prolog implementations that are most active after the appearance of the standard: their visions, goals, commonalities, and incompatibilities. Finally, we perform a SWOT analysis in order to better identify the potential of Prolog and propose future directions along with which Prolog might continue to add useful features, interfaces, libraries, and tools, while at the same time improving compatibility between implementations