[developers] Distinguishing between orthographemic and non-orthographemic rules

[Woodley Packard]

Thanks, Ann and Francis.

I agree with Ann’s improved characterization, of course, and also that a warning would be helpful.  I can have ACE do two things:  (1) warn if the STEM value is not constrained to be string or some subtype thereof, and (2) default to the empty string when an unexpected value comes up during actual processing, but print a runtime warning.

I think we ought to take this opportunity to further clarify though the exact mechanism for flagging which category a rule belongs to.  The obvious and nearly status quo convention would be that the non-TFS mechanism is invoked when %prefix or %suffix is present in the specification of the rule.  At the moment we also invite rules into that category when there is an irregular form declared in irregs.tab even if no %prefix and %suffix is declared; arguably it would be more transparent to add a %irregular declaration in-situ before this is legal (and forbid irregs.tab entries for undeclared orthographemic rules).

There may also be vestiges of other conventions laying around, such as flagging by whether or not STEM is reentrant and by ND-AFF.  The latter is or was used by the ERG (see spelling-change-rule-p from user-fns.lsp, reproduced below; I have no sense of whether this is currently coherent since ACE does not appear to heed it).  If there isn’t a clear need for them I propose that any such mechanisms be deprecated in favor of something fully declarative and uniform.

-Woodley

ERG:
(defun spelling-change-rule-p (rule)
;;; a function which is used to prevent the parser 
;;; trying to apply a rule which affects spelling and
;;; which should therefore only be applied by the morphology
;;; system.  
;;; Old test was for something which was a subtype of
;;; *morph-rule-type* - this tests for whether needs affix:
;;; < ND-AFF > = + (assuming bool-value-true is default value)
;;; in the rule
  (let ((affix (get-dag-value (tdfs-indef
                               (rule-full-fs rule)) 'nd-aff)))
    (and affix (bool-value-true affix))))

JACY:
;;;
;;; detect rules that have orthographemic variation associated to them; those
;;; who do should only be applied within the morphology system; this version is
;;; a little complicated because we change from a full-form set-up to one with
;;; on-line morphology during the course.
;;;
(defun spelling-change-rule-p (rule)
  (rule-orthographemicp rule))

> On Jul 1, 2016, at 6:29 AM, Francis Bond <bond at ieee.org> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Jun 30, 2016 at 3:17 PM, Woodley Packard
> <sweaglesw at sweaglesw.org> wrote:
>> In the case of Jacy, it seems that the rule "vbar-monotransitivization-c-lrule" neither declares orthographemic changes (by %suffix, %prefix, or entries in the irregulars table) nor declares a value for the mother’s STEM.
> 
> I think it would be ok to push the burden for this onto grammar
> developers --- no need for the processor to guess.  In this case STEM
> should be linked, the rule and a couple of others are poorly written
> and will be fixed.  Perhaps a friendly warning if this case is seen
> when compiling the grammar could help us avoid the issue in the
> future?
> 
> 
> -- 
> Francis Bond <http://www3.ntu.edu.sg/home/fcbond/>
> Division of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies
> Nanyang Technological University

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.delph-in.net/archives/developers/attachments/20160701/abce464a/attachment.html>