[developers] Sweaglesw ERG binaries don't include SEM-I?

[Francis Bond]

Thanks Stephan.

On Tue, Mar 14, 2017 at 3:30 PM, Stephan Oepen <oe at ifi.uio.no> wrote:

> please take a look at the 1214 ‘etc/erg.smi’.  i believe all top-level
> abstractions in the list above were preserved (possibly under new
> names: ‘unspec_loc’, ‘nn’, and ‘can_able’).  but some of the
> sub-hierarchies, e.g. below ‘unspec_loc’ are no longer exposed; they
> appeared all too difficult to explain (i.e. document) or interpret
> semantically—at least to dan, emily, and myself last year.
>


> when designing the predicate hierarchy for quantifiers in the external
> interface, we aimed for simplicity and generalizations that we might
> hope to explain to a semanticist.  e.g. the new ‘existential_q’
> subsumes what i believe was activated by the old ‘def_udef_a_q’, plus
> a few additional quantifiers.
>

‘def_udef_a_q’ I think is defensible, I would be happy to write an
explanation (and I do in my book :-)).    It is also used by multiple MT
systems, so I think removing it perhaps would need stronger motivation (and
it sounds as though Dan is happy to put it back in).   Sorry I was not able
to test this earlier.


> it is an interesting question to try and decide which generalizations
> to provide in the external interface, and how to encode relevant
> distinctions.  emily, for example, has long argued that dimensions
> like definiteness and proximity should be moved to variable
> properties, which would reduce the inventory of distinct quantifier
> predicates and make strong predictions about which ‘natural’ groupings
> one can obtain via underspecification.  i am sympathetic to that
> perspective, and i believe we had plans to experiment in this
> direction in the ERG ‘trunk’.
>

I think I am in broad agreement with Emily here, but until we reach this
brave new world, it would be nice to have the functionality of the old one.

much more practically, a key goal in the new SEM-I set-up was better
> modularity: a user should be able to take advantage of the added
> flexibility in 1214 and augment its SEM-I according to what they need.
> in other words, the default SEM-I should be easy to explain and by and
> large correspond to distinctions that are grammaticized and ‘make
> sense’ semantically.  but it should also be easy to further refine the
> SEM-I, e.g. link predicates to an external hierarchy, be it WordNet or
> what is useful in a transfer-based MT set-up (for a specific language
> pair or groups of languages, maybe).
>
> i just played around with adding the old ‘def_udef_a_q’ on top of the
> stock 1214 SEM-I: dropping the file attached below into ‘etc/’ and
> adding the following to the end of ‘erg.smi’:
>
>   include: jaen.smi
>
> that much appears to be enough to make the LKB generate the variation
> i believe you want:
>
> MRS(172): (lkb::generate-from-mrs (read-mrs-from-file
> "/tmp/transfer.debug.oe"))
> ("A dog barks." "The dogs bark." "The dog barks." "Dogs bark.")
>
> —you were maybe the most immediate beneficiary we had in mind when
> introducing this new flexibility, i.e. to a large degree de-coupling
> the hierarchy of semantic predicates from grammar internals.  in other
> words, the interface to generation is now highly configurable by the
> user.  the above SEM-I extension should work equivalently in ACE, i
> expect; could someone easily confirm that?
>

Thank you very much for investigating this fix.

We confirmed that this does not work :-).   ACE seems to not like the
hierarchy being redefined (if I am interpreting the error messages
correctly).
type: `def_explicit_q' already declared, go away!
type: `def_implicit_q' already declared, go away!
type: `udef_q' already declared, go away!
type: `_the_q' already declared, go away!
type: `_a_q' already declared, go away!

Note that even without jaen.smi we get some similar error messages when we
compile the ERG in the logon tree (rev 25417).

type: `compound' already declared, go away!
type: `existential_q' already declared, go away!
type: `of_p' already declared, go away!
type: `temp_loc_sp' already declared, go away!
type: `universal_q' already declared, go away!

-- 
Francis Bond <http://www3.ntu.edu.sg/home/fcbond/>
Division of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies
Nanyang Technological University
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