[developers] Punctuation and "-default-les" type mapping in PET/ERG

[Yi Zhang]

>
>
> Instead, I think it is finally time (for someone) to fix this hack in
> the handling of generic entries in PET, so the PRED value for an unknown
> word is a string which is constructed on the fly from its stem orthography
> and its POS, using the following template:
>
>  "_ORTH_POS_unk_rel"
>
> Then we should get rid of the assignment of a value for CARG except for
> proper names, where the PRED should be "named_rel" and the orthography
> should be the CARG value.


> The benefit would be that we could then always use an existing open-class
> lexical type to instantiate an entry for an unknown word, with a
> predictable semantics and a type which would better match what we find
> in our treebanks.
>
> Yi, maybe you have already done something like this?  Or could you at
> least estimate how much work would be involved in making the change?


The warning message is familiar to me, too. If I remembered correctly, it
not only occurs with the use of (extended) generic lexical entries, but also
in some cases with Ersatz things.

Looking at the PET code, it seems there should be an option called
"mrs-carg-path" in the grammar setting files, but I failed to find it in my
copy ERG. That would explain why Richard is getting warnings like the
following:

; WARNING: failed to unify new path-value ( = "No") into fs (type:
d_-_no_le)

where the empty first field (before `=') in the parenthesis indicates the
missing CARG path. I suppose adding a line like:

mrs-carg-path := "SYNSEM.LKEYS.KEYREL.CARG".

to the file `pet/common.set' would at least make some changes to the warning
messages.

But that's not the important thing, and not the ultimate solution. I would
agree with Dan's proposed solution. From what I can see, the necessary
change in PET is relatively straightforward (basically related to the
function lex_parser::add_surface_mod()). I will see if I can find time to
make an initial attempt on this soon.

Best,
Yi
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