Constraint programming in computational linguistics

Constraint programming is a programming paradigm that was originally invented in computer science to deal with hard combinatorial problems. Recently, constraint programming has evolved into a technology which permits to solve hard industrial scheduling and optimization problems. We argue that existing constraint programming technology can be useful for applications in natural language processing. Some problems whose treatment with traditional methods requires great care to avoid combinatorial explosion of (potential) readings seem to be solvable in an efficient and elegant manner using constraint programming. We illustrate our claim by two recent examples, one from the area of underspecified semantics and one from parsing.