CLAIRE (Constraint Linguistics: An Interdisciplinary Review and Evaluation) was a collaborative project between the Seminar für Sprachwissenschaft of the University of Tübingen and the Computational Linguistics/Machine Translation Group (CL/MT Group) of the University of Essex, UK, funded by the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) and the British Council, with additional support from the Anglo-German Foundation for the Study of Industrial Society, in the framework of the Academic Research Collaboration Programme (ARC), whose purpose was to facilitate collaborative links between research groups at publicly funded institutions in the United Kingdom and Germany.
CLAIRE focused on the comparative study of LFG (Lexical Functional Grammar) and HPSG (Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar), two grammatical theories of great importance both within the field of linguistics and neighbouring disciplines including Computational Linguistics, where they are the underpinnings for interesting and important applications, such as machine translation systems. They are widely perceived to be closely related, and in a certain sense, they are. However there is mounting evidence that the perceived similarities mask fundamental, conceptual and formal differences which have significant implications theoretically, empirically (that is, in relation to how they may be used to describe languages) and in relation to practical applications. CLAIRE aimed at studying the similarities and differences between LFG and HPSG, thereby providing linguists with timely and trustworthy information about the comparative strengths and weaknesses of LFG and HPSG in various areas of linguistic research and technology.
During the CLAIRE collaboration, we organized six workshops and two summer school courses. The programmes of the workshops as well as additional information about the presentations and the course material of the summer school courses can be obtained by following the links provided below.
CLAIRE workshops
CLAIRE courses at summer schools
Project leaders
German Project Leader: Prof. Dr. Erhard W. Hinrichs
British Project Leader: Dr. Louisa Sadler