[developers] Lexical rules changing predicate symbols

[Woodley Packard]

Even if it’s in some sense non-monotonic, it’s not clear that that’s a terrible thing, strictly in the context of lexical rules.  The main thing I know of that's at stake with monotonicity is how to initialize the generator chart, and I’d think certain types of non-monotonic operations constrained to "the lexicon" (broadly interpreted) could probably be accomodated by that machinery.  Maybe there’s something more at stake that doesn’t immediately come to mind.

However, I don’t see that the class of rules Ann alluded to has to be monotonic.  For example, the lexicon could be underspecified for POS or sense, and lexical rules could specialize that.

-Woodley

> On Dec 30, 2015, at 3:22 PM, Emily M. Bender <ebender at uw.edu> wrote:
> 
> Dear Ann, Dear all,
> 
> I wanted to follow up on a comment Ann made in the recent thread
> on predicate naming in MRS.  I've changed the subject line because
> I think this is orthogonal to the main discussion in the previous thread.
> 
> Ann's comment:
> 
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Ann Copestake <aac10 at cl.cam.ac.uk <mailto:aac10 at cl.cam.ac.uk>>
> Date: Mon, Dec 28, 2015 at 2:54 PM
> Subject: Re: [developers] predicate naming in MRS
> To: developers at delph-in.net <mailto:developers at delph-in.net>
> 
> [...]
> 
> The case issue also relates to treating the predicates as having a three-part structure (lexeme/pos/sense) throughout the codebase (with an option to allow simpler names for toy grammars).  This is something we have been discussing for a long time ... I believe that this is the right way to look at predicate symbols in *MRS - i.e., as an additional annotation on lexemes.  There would be advantages to doing this in the grammar - it allows for alternations that change sense to be implemented in lexical rules.  If we do this, then the lexeme part should reflect the conventional spelling, which might include case variation (and, naturally, non-ASCII characters).
> 
> [...]
> 
> I was surprised by this remark, because lexical rules changing predicate
> symbols (if that's what you mean, Ann) strikes me as non-monotonic.
> Can you clarify?
> 
> Thanks,
> Emily
> 
> 
> 
> --
> Emily M. Bender
> Professor, Department of Linguistics
> Check out CLMS on facebook! http://www.facebook.com/uwclma <http://www.facebook.com/uwclma>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.delph-in.net/archives/developers/attachments/20151230/d7e876c0/attachment.html>